first efforts

A week of realizations

...when this crazy two weeks' worth of conference travels are over, I will have driven the entire length of Illinois and back again.

...when you are utterly overloaded and have absolutely no time to deal with them, the book proofs will arrive.

...ditto for the grant proposal deadline and its can't-pass-it-up opportunity for money to pay for Big Ideas.

...when the listing on Books in Print says your first book is "out of print" but "available for order," your first book probably won't be found or ordered because most people don't search Books in Print for books out of print.

...when your book contract says that "in print" constitutes "available and for sale" even though your book is de facto out of print (see above), you probably can't get your rights back and find another publisher. Which stinks.

...when an accomplished artist takes your scholarship seriously enough to work it into an amazing piece of art, it's very humbling and very cool.

...when grad students collaborate to cook and bake they make marvelous things (a special shout-out to whoever-it-was who baked those amazing chocolate-chip-cookie-with-a-Reese's-peanut-butter-cup-in-the-middle things for the Halloween potluck in the Room 8 dungeon...pure fatty bliss).

...when daylight savings is extended another week it makes morning running really, really hard because even at 7 a.m. it is really, really dark.

...when news travels fast over e-mail you have to make darn sure you call your parents first so that they don't think you are the kind of girl who thinks mass e-mailing big news to your parents is okay.

Let me eat cake

The only thing better than a long weekend in Nashville that combined intellectual engagement, art viewing, nostalgic reuniting, pre-birthday celebrations, and an evening with good friends spent learning how to play some crazy-ass dominoes game is coming home from all of that to a phone call from a beloved friend/colleague announcing that she was at that moment on her way to my house to bring me a big hunk of cake. And not just any cake, but homemade virtue cake.

I am a lucky, lucky woman.

(Alien) Baby's First Wall Label

   

My fellowship year at Vanderbilt comes to an official close this week with the Between Word & Image symposium, the result of several collaborations with last year's Between Word & Image fellows. We organized a two-day symposium for this weekend and worked with the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery to co-curate an exhibit from its permanent collection. Fellows were able to suggest/select items from the collection for exhibition; everything we selected relates to the Between Word & Image theme. During the course of our explorations, I discovered and became really interested in the work of graphic artist Sue Coe. Four of her images will be shown, and I got to write the wall label for them. My first wall label!

Here's what I say about Coe's images (click on each to enlarge):

Sue Coe's art is potent political rhetoric. Described by some critics as a modern-day Goya, Coe combines an expressionist style with a point of view that has been termed confrontational, moralistic, and populist. Frequently combining image with text, Coe's work participates in the tradition of muckraking journalism. In her 1995 chronicle of the meatpacking industry, Dead Meat, Coe described her art as a "quest--to be a witness to understanding collusion." These four images from Coe embody this quest. Stark whites, muted grays, and inky blacks activate a moral dialectic between light and dark. In each image a single figure is juxtaposed with the oppressed masses; the boot, the beast, and the bird embody the ways oppressors dominate by force, by consumption, and by speech. Only in "Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of His Meat" does Coe suggest that these forces may not be all-powerful. In this image of haunting, Coe hints that there are consequences to collusion. For modern man, the chickens may, quite literally, be coming home to roost.  

"Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of His Meat" (1990/2001)

l to r above: "Those Who Live Close to the Heel of the Boot are the First to Hear as it Strikes the Ground" (1992); "The West Meets the Rest" (1994); "What a Golden Beak! (They Want War)" (2000).

(all images from Sue Coe Direct)

St. Thomas blues

For the most part I still love my alma mater, and I got a great liberal arts education there, but sometimes it's hard to be a St. Thomas alum.

Barn door askew

Admit it - you're dying to go in there and poke around, aren't you?

Liquidity

   

Some professorchicks would really resent having to spend their hard-earned money on plumbing fixes. Me, I kinda like it. It appeals to the uber-pragmatic part of me that proves I am my mother's daughter. Besides, copper pipes are pretty!

Let's talk about Edward Steichen

       

Or just look at him for a moment (click on each to make 'em bigger, of course). Steichen is one of my favorites because he did it all: painting, pictorialist photography, some of the earliest aerial war photography, advertising and celebrity pix, documentary. Okay, admittedly, things got a little heavy-handed and nostalgic during the whole "Family of Man" period, but still, it was the fifties, so cut him some slack. Oh, and did I mention he helped to introduce America to Matisse, Cezanne, and Rodin? And that he was Carl Sandburg's brother-in-law? Yep, that too.

Yesterday's Times had a review of a Steichen retrospective in Paris, the first in that city since 1961. (Look over there on the right, to my "what am I lookin' at" list, for a NYT slideshow of some of the images in the show). And if you're so inclined, check out Penelope Niven's marvelous and beefy book, Steichen: A Biography (Clarkson Potter, 1997). A serious rhetorical study of Steichen's work is just begging to be written.

images above, left to right: Flatiron Building, 1905; Greta Garbo, 1928; Rodin, 1902

How you know when it's that time of the semester

It just took six e-mails' worth of calendar-checking and re-checking for me to make a casual coffee date with a colleague.

For NOVEMBER 12th.

Geez.

Friday Night Geek Fest

Know how my beloved and I have been spending our Friday nights during the last couple of months? Glued to C-SPAN's multi-part series on presidential libraries. Only the truly nerdy among you can have any idea how happy this makes us. Each episode is two hours long and focuses on a different presidential library. I mean, C-SPAN has got it all: Chatty library staff hawking their president's archival "greatest hits"? Check. "Never before seen" film footage and recently declassified documents? Check. Strenuous attempts to rehabilitate lackluster leadership (cf. Eisenhower on civil rights)? Check. Doughy and affable presidential historian (Richard Norton Smith) overseeing it all each week? Check.

I was alerted to the Friday Night Geek Fest after the airing of the episodes featuring Hoover and my man FDR, but I'm catching up with those online. If you're interested, it's never too late to start watching. This Friday night it's Nixon's turn and it will be a great time to join in the fun. Given that the Nixon library in California hasn't really had any public papers because of the complicated mess that is Nixon's archive, we're dying to see what precisely they'll show us. Judging from the web site's description of this archival gem, it could be a long night:

Color. Sound. 1969. 3 min., 4 sec. President Nixon's Desk Moved into Oval Office. President Nixon's Oval Office furniture is installed as Nixon prepares to assume the presidency; a female staffer enters to clean and dust.

Even midterms sound better in Italian

For years classes in Italian have been offered in the classroom next to my office, and as I sit at the computer I sometimes hear the click-click-click of chalk on board and, in the spring and early fall when windows are open, the pleasant sounds of the Italian teacher. This fall, apparently, the students have been instructed to take their Italian out into the world--or at least out into the hallways. All this week the hallway outside my office has been crowded with students slumped on the floor in groups of four or five, textbooks open on their laps, muttering anxiously to one another in Italian. As best I can tell, this week there is some sort of oral midterm exam. And apparently a major portion of that exam involves requiring groups of students to stand around in the hallway before they are summoned into the classroom to be examined.

Fortunately I can close my office door, so this has been only mildly disruptive. But this afternoon, when a colleague knocked on my closed door and in order to open it I had to shove a fifty-pound backpack out of the way, and the owner of said backpack glared at me with a Cecil-like annoyance, I confess that I did blurt out, "You are a fire hazard!"

I just wish I could have said it in Italian