Friday Night Lights

I got some skepticism from people when I decided to attend school in Indiana, especially after living in NYC. "Maybe you'll meet a nice farm boy, but I don't know what the art situation is there" said one of my co-workers. (NYCers, by and large, are annoyingly certain of their monopoly on culture. They have a point. I miss it a lot. But it is rather obnoxious.) I confess to having some doubts about Indiana myself, after crossing the state line for the first time and being confronted with a humongous cross. I needn't have worried. Here is what I did tonight.

Two friends and I met up and walked downtown to a Japanese restaurant, called, well, Japanais. Or Japanee. It's hard to tell--I think the store says one, and online says another. Either way: holy hats, it was delicious. First off: dollar beer specials. Sapporo for a dollar? Yes please! Secondly: their Crazy Roll might be the greatest thing ever invented. Salmon, tuna, avocado, cream cheese, tempura-fried, and drizzled with a spicy orange sauce. My friends had Udom Vegetarian soup, shittake rolls, and intriguing rolls with salmon roe. I ate all their pickled ginger, because I love me some ginger, and all the food was really decently priced, too.

Then, we headed over to the Buskirk-Chumley Theater (very much like the Smith Opera House or the Reg Lenna, for those of you from Gtown or Jtown) for part of Bloomington's four day PRIDE LGTBQ Film Festival. The lobby was bedecked with rainbow banners, and the place was pretty packed. Five dollars for students, and so worth it. The night started off with the Quarryland Men's Chorus, who did two numbers. The highlight was the soloist's preamble for "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," from Spamalot. He said, "I'm sad! I'm a poor grad student and I can't find me a sugar daddy!" and a guy in the audience yelled, "there's one over hereeee!" So that was hilarious. And it just got better, as the second song was mainly a large joke about Catholicism that culminated in lots of confetti.

Next up were four short films--each night had two major films and then short films, too. My favorite was called Hammerhead, about a little boy who was obsessed with sharks and whose mother had recently started going out with a woman. And it was set in North Yorkshire, so it's hard to go wrong! There was also a powerful documentary, called Latecomers, about a man--now woman--who had a sex change in her late 60s, and a man who just came out to his family in his 50s, and their reasons for waiting that long. I've never had to defend my sexual orientation, so it is something that I take for granted. The whole evening made me think about things that I sometimes neglect to think about, especially how hard it must be for people who are married or in relationships with people when they are really attracted to another sex. I can't even fathom what that must do to you, and how hard that would be to reconcile.

The short film we really wanted to see played yesterday, unfortunately--it's set in Indian and is called "You Can't Curry Love." The title alone makes a winner. We are going to stalk it out online, so I have high hopes for that. After the shorts there was a lengthy-ish intermission, so one of my friends went to the lobby to get more delicious mystery beer (I tried some of hers and it was really tasty. I wish I knew what it was!). The other friend and I moseyed over to the Blu Boy Bakery next door--conveniently, there is a door connecting them and the theater! She got a scoop of eggnog ice cream and a scoop of pumpkin, and I got pumpkin and chocolate. Probably it goes without saying that it was good, like all food in this town, but it was GOOD. We also ogled the truffles. The blood orange and dulce de leche truffles were beautiful--it looked like spun sugar/stained glass on top of them! Most had designs painted on, too.

We brought the ice cream back to our seats for the feature film. We went specifically to see Contracorriente (Undertow), a movie about a small Peruvian fishing village, where two men are secretly in love, and one of them is married and expecting his first child. And then there is a horrible accident. I knew something was going to happen to one of them, I just knew it. But it still whacked me over the head when it did. And yet, it was really original how they handled it--it didn't feel tired or stereotyped or anything. But it was so hard to watch--their love for each other, and how they had to be on their guard all the time, and how that must tear someone up inside. Because he really did love his wife, too. Anyway. It was very impressive. We cried a bunch. It felt so real, and awful in its realness. I would recommend, but be prepared for an emotional draining.

After that, it was nice to go out in the lobby and have the Men's Chorus holding rainbow umbrellas and being cheerful. We walked through campus to catch our respective buses, and it was still and peaceful (even if the bus wait was pretty chilly). And now I'm in my apartment, heading to bed. Good Friday night? Yup, I think so.

Focus On: Stuart Davis

I haven't done "art of the week" from the IU Art Museum in about, well, two months, so let's bring it back, shall we?

This work by Stuart Davis is one of the largest paintings in the museum and one of the highlights of the Western art floor. Called Swing Landscape, this is the first painting that the museum owned.(Swing Landscape, 1938. Thanks to iub.edu for the image!)

Stuart Davis (1892-1964) was raised in an art-focused Philadelphia family, and at an early age came under the tutelage of Robert Henri, becoming the youngest member of the Ashcan School. (I did a Henri painting for "art of the week" awhile ago--see here.) Swing Landscape is an abstract landscape of Gloucester, MA, a smallish city which seems vibrant, alive, and interesting in this painting. You don't really need to know which city this is, although knowing it is Gloucester, a fishing town, helps explain the water and piers on the left. What is so great about this work in person is how bright and bold it is. You do get a sense of the jazz music that Davis liked, as the buildings and shapes are slightly off-kilter. You can pick out things that might be monuments, or just sections of line, color, and movement that grab you in a certain way.

One reason why I like looking at modern art (which I think this would count as) is that I know so little about it. Often when I'm looking at Western art (especially European, especially from 1550-1700), my brain goes into academic mode, and while I might "get more" out of them, I'm not surprised by what I see, usually. With Swing Landscape, I didn't know anything about Stuart Davis before viewing it for the first time, and that is okay. Sometimes art just needs to be looked at. Perhaps not a profound statement for someone in an art history graduate program, but I stand by it.

But, here is something really cool that I found out. Originally, Swing Landscape was commissioned by the FAP (Federal Art Project), a subsection of the WPA (Works Progress Administration), during the 1930s, and a good way to keep artists a little funded during the Great Depression. Swing Landscape was meant to be hung in the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, but for some reason it was sold instead, and we bought it! The Brooklyn Museum has quite a few of the murals which were installed at the Williamsburg Housing Project--I used to walk by them daily to get to my office. (They're in a glass encased corridor on the first floor, back by the sculpture garden, heading to the elevators, in case you're looking for them.) From what I have seen of these murals, they are also abstract, but not based on a specific place, and the colors tend to be more subtle and muted--part of that could be from hanging not in a museum for years, but in a presumably brightly light housing project. Perhaps Davis's was different in style and so was rejected. Want to know more about the murals? Check out the Brooklyn Museum's works here. Want to know about the FAP and Williamsburg, with better images from the Museum's first show of the works? See here.

And thanks to Stuart Davis, for making a grey and snowy week a little less grey for me.

OH, and important blog housekeeping announcement--one of my art history friends has started a blog on ART, where she'll spend the year writing about whatever art strikes her fancy. Check it out here! Like me, she is enamored of the 17th century (although she leans Spanish Baroque while I lean Italian). We both took an Islamic class last semester and also loved that a lot--her post on the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul is especially good. Her blog is now linked in my sidebar. Hooray for art and art historians!

I say Qur’ān, you say Koran

As I sat in the library yesterday for four hours performing "quranic exegesis" for my Prophet Muhammad seminar, all I kept thinking was, "this time, girl, you have got in over your head." Quranic exegesis, like Biblical exegesis, is looking at a religious text and critically examining it. A lot of it has to do with word choice, so, for instance, why a translator translated Hebrew one way, and how another version might vary slightly, or why certain passages are important. I had Biblical exegesis coming out my ears two years ago, so I figured the article on the translation problems in the Qur’ān wouldn't be too awful. Well, I figured wrong.

Two problems arose early on: I know very, very little about the Qur’ān, and this author presupposed that I had read it, and apparently remembered every chapter and verse number, as he had a tendency to say things like, "obviously, in Q 6:112 this is also evident," AND I unfortunately can not read Latin, Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic, which, along with German and Italian, were used by this author WITHOUT providing translations.

An example of what I'm talking about. This is from the eighth page.
"Instructive examples of parallel phraseology for divine and satanic inspiration are generated by Quranic application of the verb alqā (literally to cast, but often synonymous with arsala, or with awhā, in the sense of dispatch), e.g. Q. 40:15 [arabic phrase] (cf. 4:171; and a similar construction with nafakha 21:91), 20:39 [arabic phrase]. The imagery was perpetuated in the exegetical tradition, e.g. [long arabic phrase] describing the activity of Gabriel."
(Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, 60.)

So if I could read Arabic, this wouldn't be too bad, and I'm planning on locating a translated Qur’ān and at least checking some of the verses. But even just ignoring all of the non-English words, the friend I was working with and I had to get out the English dictionary, because half of his English words were ones I had never even HEARD of. We are also two of four people in the seminar who can not read Arabic, so I just had this feeling that everyone else would be breezing through the article, gamely reading the Arabic, while I stared at it, hating it. You had to have professorial permission to get into this class and she obviously let us in, so she must trust us well enough. But feeling like you're the one person at the party who doesn't know what is going on is not a great feeling to have.

The two of us are slated to lead discussion on this reading and three others next Wednesday in class. Send us some scholarly vibes, please.

How I Spent My Winter Vacation

Charlie Brown always had to write a report about what he did on his summer vacation, but I've never had to do that. (Did anyone have to do that? Maybe it was just Charlie Brown.) Anyway, I am back in Indiana after three weeks at home/my relatives on the other side of the state, all of which was lovely, fun, relaxing, and too too short. I spent a large chunk of my time curled up on the couch either reading or eating, in some cases reading about eating, and in two cases, reading through letters. And that is what I'm going to mention today.

While I was at my aunt's I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It's about the German occupation of Guernsey during WWII, something which I didn't even know happened! It's told through letters between a writer based in London and some people in Guernsey, and then she goes to Guernsey because she connects with them over books. I know it's been out for a few years so I'm a little behind the times, but it is such a good book. And a fairly quick read--I'm usually pretty slow and I finished it in a day and a half. It's sweet without being cloyingly so, and it's clever and the characters are people you genuinely would like to have tea with. But they don't feel one-dimensional either. The people in Guernsey had horrible, horrible things happens to them, and the descriptions by one character who was in a concentration camp are hard to get through. At the same time, some of the German soldiers who occupied Guernsey were kind too, and they were also starving and scared, which made me think about the German Army in a way that I normally don't. Having the book conducted through letters was a great way to do it. It's lovely.

Since I was on epistolary book kick (epistolary meaning something which consists of letters--I just looked that up), happily for me my mother got for Christmas As Always, Julia: the Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon. It is fabulous. Having been raised watching Julia Child on PBS, I have known for a long time that she was a witty, opinionated dame, but so is Avis DeVoto, it turns out. Their friendship started because Avis's husband Bernard had written an article on knives which Julia, who was living in Paris with her husband Paul, had read and liked, and wrote to thank him and mailed him some knives. Avis, who answered her husband's letters from readers, wrote back. And they became friends.

Avis and Julia were penpals, so their letters were a bit different than letters between people who know each other in person. They sent pictures of themselves and their families, and eventually they met. They stayed in close contact for the rest of their lives. What is so cool about this period in Julia Child's life is that the letters started in 1953ish, when she was just beginning to work on her revolutionary French cookbook, which would eventually become Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Avis was instrumental in getting it published, through her connections with publishing houses. This was also the time when McCarthy was wrecking havoc on civil liberties, and as the DeVotos and Childs were all liberal, they had much to talk about.

As Always, Julia, encompasses 7 years of their letters, during which time Bernard DeVoto had a heart attack and died at a fairly young age, and Julia and Paul moved from Paris to Marseilles to Bonn, Germany to Washington DC to Oslo to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Avis also lived. One thing this book did was make me want to travel--I found myself getting quite jealous of Julia, who frequently zipped over to Paris while they were living in Marseilles and Bonn. Avis, too, spent all of her summers on the Cape or Maine or out West. I was also jealous about how passionate they were about politics. Avis was so proud of Adlai Stevenson that she wrote many letters about him, and helped fundraise for him. I can't think of any politicians I am excited about, and that is sad. This book also made me want to cook, but then also made me lose my appetite. I will never be excited about chicken livers or the best way to bone a duck. I don't need sauces on my vegetables, and though someday I would like to make beurre blanc, but it's not high on my list of life-goals. Still, it's fascinating to read about someone who is so focused on food, who wants others to love it as much as she does.

Both of these books got me thinking about letters, and really how important they are as a record. Yeah, we have email, but it's not the same. Emails won't be in archives for dorky researchers like me to someday pore over. Getting a letter from someone you care about is such a good feeling. My friends and I do send a fair amount of non-email mail, but my New Years goal is to write two letters a week. If you get one from me, you certainly shouldn't feel obligated to reply. But do think about writing a letter to someone.