Busy, Busy

The hectic end-of-semester rush is here, and I'm really feeling it this time. I sort of put off-slash-kept changing my mind on what to do for my project for Dr. Cooper's class, with the result that I finished my two other projects early and now have to throw myself into this 110% before my presentation on December 1. Naturally, with Thanksgiving coming up, I have even less time, plus there's so much else going on around this time of year, so it's been rather stressful.

Yet as much as I begrudge the time that I could be spending working on my project and feeling less like I'm going to expire from a heart attack at any moment, I had some fun this week. I covered two classes for my friend Amy on Thursday at the Ambler campus, which is 20 minutes from my house and a world away from the downtown campus--it was like a cute, miniaturized version of Fairfield (really miniaturized, really; I couldn't help but think of what these kids were missing out on versus the main campus). Her first class was an Arts of the Western World, and the kids were...mouthy, verging on disrespectful. There were like three different conversations going on during my lecture--in a small class of only 25 or so. Once or twice I asked them to be quiet, but it's hard to be authoritative when you're basically a substitute teacher. It didn't bother me much, though, for that same reason--they're not my students, and the other kids did seem interested. One girl asked me after class what else I teach, and expressed interest in my Heritage survey next semester because "you seem to actually know what you're talking about." Um, OK--that was an awkward compliment, because was she suggesting that Amy--whose lectures notes I was using, mind you--doesn't?

The second class was much more awesome--it was a class on mythology in art, and I was handling the early Renaissance, so Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, etc. The class was smaller and had many more adult students, and everyone was so eager to participate: they knew the myths in question, they had pertinent observations, questions, etc. A teacher's dream, in other words. Everyone has the most fun with this painting, Botticelli's Venus and Mars, which probably decorated a piece of furniture like a chest in early Renaissance Florence:


Mars has passed out after sex and Venus is looking at him like That's it? What the hell kind of god are you? Five hundred years later and some things haven't changed. Also, imagine how pissed Mars is going to be when that satyr blow the conch shell in his ear (Venus probably put them up to it). After class, several of the students complimented me on the lecture and told me they really enjoyed it, which hey, it's always really nice to hear, especially when these aren't even your own students and are thus clearly not sucking up (unlike the girl who came up to me after class once, pointedly complimented my green coat, and then asked for an extension on her paper. Brown-nosing fail.)

Thursday night, there was a lecture on campus that I had been grumbling about having to attend, but it turned out to be really great. The speaker was Jonathan Lopez, who wrote a book called The Man Who Made Vermeers about the Dutch forger Hans van Meegeren. He was arrested by the Dutch government in 1945 on charges of collaborating with the Nazis, since he had sold Hermann Goering, the number two man in Germany, a priceless Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress. In order to evade that extremely serious charge, van Meegeren admitted that he hadn't sold Goering anything priceless--it was his own forgery. It later turned out that he'd been forging Vermeers for years, and they had been accepted by art historians and curators around the world, including the National Gallery of Art in DC. His forgeries even included the Supper at Emmaus that was considered, at the time, to be Vermeer's masterpiece.

But the real fascination of this story is not so much that van Meegeren was able to produce forged Vermeers that fooled everyone; it's that the Vermeers he produced look nothing like real Vermeers. For example, these two paintings are legitimate Vermeers, the Geographer and the Girl with the Red Hat:



This is van Meegeren's Supper at Emmaus:


Not for a second would anyone today think that the same artist painted that third image as the other two, and yet this fooled everyone. Lopez' most interesting argument was that fakes rely on subliminal references to contemporary culture that make the picture oddly resonant to the viewer and thus more likely to accept it; however, after a few decades (he suggested 40 years is the timeline) the power of those contemporary references has faded, leaving people surprised that anyone could have been tricked all those years ago. In the case of this painting, Lopez traced its relationship to the style of volkisch painting being promoted in Nazi Germany, of which the Dutch van Meegerem was a huge supporter (he sent Hitler a note in 1942 thanking him for doing such a good job. Seriously. It was in Lopez' slideshow), as well as the resemblance between the facial physiognomy of Christ here and Albrecht Durer's famous Self Portrait:

Durer was enthusiastically held up as the paragon of "good" German art by the Nazis, and they had specifically identified his physiognomy as the "ideal" Germanic face. Thus, by incorporating those elements into his completely fake painting, van Meegerem made it subtly more attractive to his contemporaries, who were already "used to" seeing paintings that looked like this.

This is only a small fraction of Lopez' argument, both about this painting and about van Meegeren's forgeries in general, but it was really fascinating to listen to.

Still Life

Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813, oil on panel

One of my classmates gave her presentation in our Caravaggio seminar on the relationship between Caravaggio and 19th century American still life painters. Typically the American still life tradition has been linked to the long history of Dutch still lifes, but my friend discovered that the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts had exhibited a still life attributed to Caravaggio in 1811, just before Raphaelle Peale and others began to paint the kind of tenebristic composition shown above.

The location of the painting itself is a mystery, but the fact that it was identified as a Caravaggio in the early 19th century, when his reputation was basically in the gutter (he wouldn't be catapulted to the megastardom through which we know him today until a historic exhibition in Milan in 1951) suggests that it was a secure attribution. Only one independent still life by Caravaggio is known today, this incredibly illusionistic work of 1599 (it's like you could reach out and stroke the wicker of that basket!):


Yet we know he painted more of them--and one of them, it seems, found its way to Philadelphia and had an impact on Peale, a member of a prominent family of Philadelphia artists.

Now, I'm not usually a big fan of still life. Caravaggio's marvelous little picture is an exception to this rule, on account of its general awesomeness, but in general, blech. Dutch still life, in particular, is probably the genre of Western art I like least.

Clara Peeters, Still Life with Flowers, 17th c.

I know they're full of hyper-specific symbolism and they constitute warnings about vanitas, but I just find them so. damn. ugly. My friend knows all this, so she was teasing me in advance about how I would probably be bored to tears by her paper, but to my surprise, I really enjoyed not only her argument, but the images as well. Don't Peale's blackberries look good enough to eat? She also showed this late 16th century drawing of irises by a Florentine naturalist named Ligozzi (not technically a still life, but it's still something I'm not usually intrigued by):

I have a fondness for irises, so this really struck me as lovely. However, I remain resolute in my hatred of Dutch still life. Gah.

Fun with Professors

A few weeks ago Jasmine, Agnes and I went to see "Never Let Me Go" at the Ritz in Old City, where tickets are $6 for students. One of our professors, Dr. Bolman, happens to live in that neighborhood. Now, Dr. Bolman has always had something of a fearsome reputation as the professor who puts the fear of God into undergraduates and graduates alike, the professor whose constant watchword is "professionalism." Not a professor who gets buddy-buddy with her students by any means. Thus, I was a little surprised to get an email from her saying that if we went to another movie at the Ritz before she left for Egypt on December 1, she'd like to invite us to her apartment beforehand.

Apparently, the recent retirement of her mentor at Bryn Mawr caused her to re-evaluate her attitude toward students (well, not all students. A few select students. Us, basically.) She told us last night that her mentor never showed any fondness for her students until they completed their PhDs, at which point she suddenly started signing her emails "Love, Dale." Dr. Bolman told us she had this epiphany where she realized she didn't have to be like that and didn't want to be. So, voila--we got to visit Dr. Bolman's fabulous apartment.

The building was old, completely modernized except for some cool features like the 20-foot ceilings, exposed wooden beams, and original dark wood floors (the nails had square heads, which was interesting). She has more books than I have ever seen in anyone's personal collection. Her office was lined with bookcases, her hallway was lined with bookcases, the living room was lined with bookcases! It was pretty incredible. It was also decorated in a really cool fashion, which I don't think I can really describe, and her furniture rocked. Like, a ridiculously comfortable leather couch that also incorporated a chaise longue--from Ikea, although I never would have thought so (apparently they do have 'higher end' furniture." There's an odd sense of intimacy in being in a professor's home and putting your coat and bag down in her bedroom, or using the bathroom and seeing all her makeup. Jasmine and I agreed on the ride home that at first it was a little bit awkward, because we weren't quite sure what to say (we wound up talking about school, naturally). Luckily there was wine to drink and cheese to nibble on.

We had invited her to join us for the movie, and she accepted, so off we went in the cold to see "Hereafter," which we were expecting to be a sad movie. Dr. Bolman announced herself as a crier and made us promise that if she cried we wouldn't tell anyone, but in the end it wasn't really a crying kind of movie. There were some sad bits, but none too heart-wrenching, and the ending was happy in a contrived sort of way. I don't think I'd really recommend it to anyone else, it was fine, but nothing special. Anyway, after that we went to a Persian restaurant near Dr. Bolman's apartment for takeout, to which she treated us, using her "voice of command," as she called it, on Jasmine when she seemed about to insist on contributing. That was pretty hilarious, especially the way Jasmine immediately obeyed and sat down. Then we went back to her apartment to eat. As we were getting plates I noticed that among the items on her fridge were two magnets of Bella and Edward from Twilight. WTF?

We did wind up having an interesting discussion about psychics and talking to the dead (Matt Damon plays one in the film). I asked if the others would consult one. Dr. Bolman told us that twenty years or so, she used to visit a psychic regularly! (I managed not to let my mouth fall open, but it was a close thing). She said that she was looking for some kind of confirmation that there was something else out there, some other dimension, and she would go to this woman who claimed to read auras and tell you vague things about your future. She could also tell you things about people in photographs if you brought them in; Dr. Bolman said she was thoroughly convinced by this woman's ability to accurately describe people she had never met and only seen in a photograph, and that the vague predictions about her future always came true, but she realized ultimately that it was drawing too much of her attention and money, so she stopped going.

Jasmine said she wasn't sure if she would consult a psychic, Agnes said probably not. I told them about how my mom consulted a psychic on her birthday once and was quite convinced--the person told her she saw a red-headed woman who wanted to know if my mom was still angry at her (she was) and a large man with a breathing problem (my dad had sleep apnea), who wanted her to know that he was OK. I said that I wasn't sure either, partially because I'm a skeptic and I don't believe in life after death, and partially because I don't feel the burning need to talk to my parents. I mean, what would I say to them? I miss you? Duh. And what would I want to hear back, that they're fine, that they're proud of me, etc? Since I don't believe in an afterlife of any variety, I'm not concerned about them being "fine," and I know they were proud of me. I think trying to communicate with them, even if it were possible, would just be more painful than it'd be worth. Jen, on the other hand, would leap at the chance, I'm sure (in fact, I'm shocked she's never done it). However, even though I don't believe in the afterlife, I'm not completely skeptical about psychics. I mean, we only use a fraction of our brain power, so who's to say what could be possible for people who can somehow access the rest? After all, we only perceive time as completely linear; maybe they do catch glimpses of the future.

We also wound up discussing our favorite works of art. I was surprised to learn that Dr. Bolman's favorite was Simone Martini's Annunciation in the Uffizi (she's a Byzantinist/Coptic specialist, so I thought it'd be something there). Agnes' favorite was a painting from the Waddi Natrun site she's worked on in Egypt. Jasmine's favorites are two Saint Cecilias: Raphael's painting, and Stefano Maderno's statue. I had serious trouble thinking of favorites; in the end I said El Greco's View of Toledo, and Canova's statue of Pauline Bonaparte in the Borghese.

Anyway, we had a really fun time last night. I heart Dr. Bolman!

Fun with Transcription

I'm participating in an online course right now on transcribing Renaissance archival documents through the Medici Archive Project in Rome. I have zero experience with archives, but archive research is a large part of the "history" part of art history, so I'll be doing it someday. I was rather unprepared for Renaissance conventions of orthograhy, spelling, punctuation, you name it. The first obstacle is the handwriting itself, which can be absolutely impenetrable, like this week's supplemental document:


I have no idea what this says. In the entire thing, I could pick out the words "della sposa," that's all. Luckily, I'm not alone, no one else in the class can figure it out either. A lot of the other participants clearly have experience reading older hands and know a lot more about Italian grammar than I do, which is a little intimidating.

The chief difficulty in transcribing these documents is the number of abbreviatons that people used--there are a lot, and while some follow fairly standard conventions, others seem just totally random. Some are easy to figure out; if you see a document start off V. S. Ecc.a, that's Vostra Signoria Eccellenza, your excellent lordship. Final vowels are routinely left off words and indicated by a little dash of superscript, so governar' is "governare," etc. More random is how they'll omit letters within a word: de'a is "detta," and dima'davano is "dimandavano." I mean, you're already writing out the whole word, what's one more letter? They will also use multiple abbreviations for long words, so gra'diss.a is "grandissima." And then sometimes I just have no idea, like last week, when the writer of the document identified herself as Caterina Picc.i, and everyone else was like "oh, Caterina Piccolomini, of course!" and I was like wait, what?

There is a little book on medieval and Renaissance document abbreviations that lists some of the most common ones, which is especially key when it's not an abbreviation but rather a symbol, or an entire word indicated by a single letter with some marks above it. Unfortunately, there were no real standards for this back then. Then you have to factor in the legibility, how educated the person was, where in Italy they were from (all the different cities in Italy marked a different day as the beginning of the New Year, so March 25 1547 in Venice is still 1546 in Naples), and, basically, whether they could put a coherent sentence together. It's pretty daunting, and I can't imagine being left on my own to look at this stuff in an archive.

That said, this week's main document was fairly easy to decipher; the writing is very legible, the abbreviations are pretty standard, and I could immediately figure out what they're talking about (that can be a real help in figuring out an otherwise ambiguous word). It's a news report from Antwerp on the current political situation in England, namely the Prayerbook Rebellion of 1549.


I've transcribed it and translated it, since now we're doing a round-robin thing where everyone contributes a line. My favorite is this line:

Che il conte di Varvich et il signor Gray quali erano destinati per capitani quali della armata contro lo scozzesi erano mandate con una parte della gente per impedire le vettovaglie, et havevano intercetti alcuni che venivano in aiuto di detto populo, et fatti morire alcuni preti.

That the count of Warwick and Mr Gray, who were intended to be captains of the armada against the Scots, were sent with a part of the army to impede their supply lines, and they have intercepted some who came to aid those people, and have killed some priests.

Those Protesants did not fuck around...

Post-Script

The vet put Lady Jane to sleep yesterday afternoon. He called me and explained that while he could keep her alive longer, he didn't think it was the humane course of action, especially since he couldn't explain why she was unable to walk and was going downhill so quickly. I was at school by this point, so I'm glad that I'd gotten all cried out in the morning. Of course, I'd told a bunch of people why I was going to be late, so my friends all asked about my new cat, and Dr. Cooper asked if I had a picture, and I had to tell them nope, sorry, false alarm, no new kitty. Sigh.

Yesterday I went to the Wissahickon around 9 for a walk and took my camera with me to finally capture some pictures of the gorgeous foliage before it all falls to the ground.


The route I take, between Kitchens Lane and Livezy Lane entrances to the park, has two trail options. The lower trail is down by the river and much more scenic, but it's incredibly rocky and takes maybe 45-50 minutes round trip. You also have to go over Fingerspan Bridge and then down the 100 feet of stone steps, which I haven't been keen on doing lately while they're covered in damp leaves. The upper trail, which is for hikers, bikers, and horses, is less picturesque but faster, probably 30 minutes round-trip, especially if you jog the flatter parts. The high trail has its challenges, though, at least for someone like me who's afraid of heights: three massive concrete pipes that lead you across ravines. In two of the cases, you can easily follow a trail that leads you up and around them, but you have to cross the third if you want to go out to Livezey Lane (actually, there is an alternate route here too, but it takes you out like a quarter-mile up the road, so I don't bother). Naturally, the third is the longest and has the steepest ravine underneath it. Naturally.


Thus, since it freaks me out to cross the pipes even when conditions are totally dry, I've been extra freaked about doing it with damp shoes. Yesterday, however, I decided I was going to take the high trail to Livezy, then walk down the road so I could take the lower trail back to Kitchens, thereby giving me time to snap photos of my favorite vistas. So I braved the third pipe, freaking out all the while, and headed down to the water to take the low trail. While I was down there I noticed a cat lying in the leaves, and went over to introduce myself because, hey, I like to do those things. She was really friendly, and when I pulled my hand away she got up to follow me--and promptly fell over. Then she tried again, and fell again. Uh-oh. I watched her for a few minutes, thinking, "Man, this cat must be dying." Thomas kept falling over right before we took him to be euthanized, so I figured this cat was in the same position.

Of course this had to happen when I was something like two miles away from my car. I decided to hike back, get the car, drive to Livezey Lane and then take the cat to Phyllis' vet in Chestnut Hill. While I was headed back--thinking of how that cat almost definitely had fleas, and how I didn't even have a blanket in my car, nor my credit card or license, and should I go home to get something and come back and run the risk she'd drag herself into the woods--it did cross my mind that I could just leave her there and let nature take its course; it costs $90 to have a cat euthanized, but nothing to let it die on its own in the woods. Then I thought of my mom, and if she would ever leave a helpless sick animal to fend for itself, especially a cat, and I knew she wouldn't, not even if she was only helping it to be killed humanely.

Anyway, I made it back to the car and sped over to Livezey. The only thing I had in the car was an inflatable air mattress in the trunk, so I wrapped the cat in that once I'd successfully manhandled her into the car. She was clearly frightened, but so gentle: she didn't hiss or try to bite me. I took her to the vet fully expecting they would just tell me she needed to be put to sleep, but instead an hour later they told me they wanted to run a whole barrage of tests on her to see if she might just be weak and dehydrated. Expected cost: $190. I said OK, and went home. The vet called later with good news: her bloodwork looked good, she didn't have FIV or leukemia, she was just weak and anemic. He said they'd give her some steroids and antibiotics, and her problem walking might clear up on its own once she was stronger. He wanted to keep her overnight but told me I could take her home in the morning.

Phyllis and I talked about it last night, and decided that since this cat had clearly 'chosen' us, we should adopt her. We decided to give her a trial run for a few weeks on the front porch, and see if her walking issues went away. Phyllis asked if I'd thought of a name, and I lied and said no, but of course I had--I remembered she had a cute little grey face, so I thought we could call her Lady Jane Grey. (As I discovered today, only her head was grey; the rest of her was "blue cream," a diluted form of the tortoiseshell gene.) Luckily we still had most of Thomas' things, but I went to the store this morning and bought wet and dry catfood as well. Then I went to the vet.

I should have known something was up by the look on the receptionist's face when I said I was there to pick up the stray. She told me the vet tech would be out shortly "to talk." That is exactly they do to you at hospitals when someone is dead or dying, but I was so confident in what the vet himself had told me that I just shrugged. Then the technician came out, and told me that the cat had gone sharply downhill overnight. She could barely eat, and couldn't stand at all. They told me they needed to keep her for observation, but that it's likely she'll need to be euthanized anyway. I went in the back to see her, and even without any medical expertise I could tell how bad she was; she couldn't even raise her head to look at me when I petted her, whereas yesterday she could move around and try to follow me. I went back out front and signed the euthanization release form: if the vet decides her condition is too bad, they'll put her to sleep today, without waiting for me. I wouldn't be able to come back till tomorrow, and there's no reason to make her suffer.

Everyone was really nice and sympathetic, especially since they agreed she's a really sweet cat. I know it's better for her to be put to sleep painlessly than to die out there in the woods, alone, but I still found myself crying all the way home. It's my own fault for getting my hopes up, I know: I named her in my head, and set up the dishes and litterbox on the porch, and bought a couple different kinds of wet food because I didn't know what she'd like. The vet just seemed to optimistic about her chances yesterday that I thought it was a done deal. I was looking forward to having a cat again, but now it doesn't look like that will happen, or if it does, it won't be Lady Jane.

Today is a nasty, rainy day. I'm glad I decided to go to the park yesterday, when I don't normally go on Tuesdays. I'm glad I decided to swing down by the water when I would normally have just turned around on the high trail. I'm glad she's somewhere warm and comfortable, and that there will be people with her when they put her down. I'm just so sad that I couldn't take her home with me. And now I'm crying again, and I have to leave for the train. Dammit!

Fun Times with the Spouse

Sean's here, yay! He got in really late on Thursday, and then came to school with me on Friday, He went to gallery talk given by Dr. Silk on communism and the arts in the 1950s while I was teaching my section, and then we went to get lunch from one of the trucks on campus. The proprietor, a very friendly old man with a Greek accent, must have seen our rings and seen us kissing, because he congratulated us on 'committing to each other for life,' and then told us about his grandchildren and showed us pictures on his cell phone before handing over our (delicious!) wraps. That was some good feta, I tell you. I think I've made a new friend.

Friday afternoon into the evening we volunteered to help Dr. Bolman set up for the reception she was hosting for the attendees of the Byzantine Studies Conference at Penn to celebrate her exhibition on the conservation of the Red and White monasteries. This is a pretty big deal, not only because the exhibition is awesome and is going to travel to museums around the world, but because it raises Temple's profile in the Byzantine studies community considerably. Many of the people who came told her they'd never been to Temple before but were quite impressed, and I know that the vast and delectable spread, catered by Whole Foods, was a crowd-pleaser. One guy actually took a photo of one of the tables before leaving. We didn't leave until 8:30, and Dr. Bolman insisted we all take a bottle of wine (with strict instructions not to tell anyone she gave it to us) as well as whatever food we could carry; Sean and I opted for an entire fruit tray, because that was some of the best-tasting fruit I've had in recent memory. She was really pleased that so many non-medieval students were there to help out, and she was doubly pleased that I managed to volunteer my husband at the same time!

Saturday morning we went to the PMA, where I had an appointment with the art librarian, and then walked around the collections for a couple of hours. We were both pretty exhausted from the night before, so we weren't at the optimal level of enthusiasm for a museum tour, but it was still nice. Generally in museums we wander around arguing about what pictures we would and wouldn't hang in our future house. Sean's always worried that I would want some "nightmarish" modern art piece. We did agree on a few select items, including Frederic Edwin Church's Pichincha, but we disagreed on a lot more! Oh, and he tried to embarrass me in the Abstract Expressionist room by making fun of the art. Sigh.

Last night we went to see Henry V at the Sedgwick Theatre, down the street from my house. It's in a beautiful Art Deco building from the 1920s, and although the interior has been really ravaged by time, there are echoes of the original mural decorations on the walls and ceiling. The actual theater portion of the building was sectioned off a long time ago, so the performance took place in a huge oval-shaped room that was once one of the lobbies (the theater group's website has a picture of the ceiling in this room, with a chandelier and the remains of the painted decoration).

The play was done pretty old-school, with bare stage, largely normal lighting, and almost no props. The costumes ranged from historical (for the foppish French nobles) to recent-historical (WWII uniforms for the soldiers) to contemporary (tuxedos for King Henry's court when they were being formal). Men also played the women's roles--and played them disturbingly well, considering the amount of movement in high heels that was required. The performance was really good, but the play itself was a little odd; immediately after the dramatic victory at Agincourt, the tone switches to comedy with Henry playing a trick on one of his soldiers. Then there's an extended courtship scene at the end between Henry and the daughter of the vanquished French king, which, while funny, made me lean over and whisper to Sean "when did this turn into a romantic comedy?" Then it ended a couple of minutes later on a totally down note, showing the king's future death and the accession of his young son, who would lose everything that his father had just won. It was kind of uneven, but overall extremely enjoyable. Oh, and student tickets were $10! Win.

Semi-Sick Day

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.

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:

"Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day that the educated nobleman Michel de Montaigne retired from court and public duties, retreated into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday. His plan was to spend the second half of his life looking at himself. Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais.” His first two books of essays appeared in 1580. By the time he published a third book, in 1588, everyone in France with a philosophic bent and a classical education had read the first two. His books were utterly original. They were not confessional nor were they autobiographical. They made no claim to composing the narrative of a life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves—and, of course, with himself. His belief that the self, far from settling the question “Who am I?,” kept leaping ahead of its last convictions was so radical that some describe Montaigne as “the first modern man.”

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!"

More from "The Modern Mind"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beginnings

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

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


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

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

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

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

A Bit of Serendipity in Pirandello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading The Modern Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Things, Pt II

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


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

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

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

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

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