I have a deeply conflicted relationship with seasons. As a little girl, I loved a particular children’s book that existed for the sole purpose of teaching kids seasons. Living in a seasonless climate myself, it seemed like the book was describing a fantastic, made-up world. I memorized a seasonal calendar from that book. December through February was winter, and everything was blanketed in snow and fringed with icicles. March through May was spring, with blossom-covered trees and flowers that didn’t grow in Hawaii. June through August was summer, full of green grass, sunshine, and ice cream cones. And September through November was fall, with brightly colored leaves, apples, pumpkins, and, uh, plaid skirts. I was utterly taken. When we had to draw pictures of heaven for Sunday School, I drew a sprawling landscape where each quadrant of heaven boasted a different season: snow by the pearly gates, summer by the Tree of Life, autumn by the streets of gold, and spring with a lion and lamb. Yes, I was a dedicated seasonophile.

Then, I moved to the mainland and was forced to face the sad reality that seasons are not idyllic end-to-end. On some level, that children’s book month-by-month breakdown of seasons has remained with me, and I tend towards bitterness when the weather doesn’t follow the prescribed pattern.

Take today, for instance. It is March. My childhood education taught me that March is spring. There should be chicks and daffodils and baby rabbits. And yet, in reality, today looks like this:

On a rational level, I can accept that months are mere guides to the fluctuating whims of seasonal weather. And yet… it’s March, and that deeply ingrained belief in seasonal order rebels. Be spring, weather, be spring! How can I “spring forward” this Sunday if there is still snow on the ground, signifying winter? How can Banana Republic cruelly show me pictures of women traipsing about in cotton skirts when I cannot step foot outdoors without a coat?

Thankfully, this is one complaint that can be easily toppled through the aesthetic delight that made me a seasonophile in the first place. It’s cold, but at least it’s pretty:

Update:

Update:

Dr. Paul Morton ranks among my favorite professors at Covenant. Besides being a tremendous history teacher, speaking in eminently quotable phrases, and dealing with college politics exclusively through the lens of sarcasm, Dr. Morton also had a remarkably specific code of dress.

On the days when he wasn’t wearing a sweater vest, he would stride into class clad entirely in a single color. He wore black, of course, like the erudite intellectual that he is. A black turtleneck, slightly faded black pants, a black belt, black socks, and black shoes. Sometimes he chose brown as the color of the day: a chocolate button-down, brown trousers, and coordinating belt and shoes. He wore a cream-and-khaki ensemble, too, and that one played with texture; the cable knit of the ivory sweater vest playing off of the khaki twill and cream jersey turtleneck.

Not that the man was afraid of color. He owned forest green pants around which he built a truly amazing outfit. He had kidney-bean colored pants, too. And while I occasionally cringed when his shades of olive green inhabited the shadowlands of neither-matching-nor-contrasting, I admired his commitment. Not everyone can pull off 6’4″ of eggplant.

But today I read a New York Magazine profile on New Yorkers who wear a single color — and not black — exclusively. My favorite was Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fabric designer who is deeply, passionately dedicated to kelly green.

I guess Dr. Morton has a ways to go before he can count himself among the truly color-committed.

On Friday night I saw the writing on the wall… and it was mine.

It is a strange sensation to walk into a museum — a real museum, not Covenant’s Art Barn — and see one’s own words plastered on the wall. It is even stranger to see well-appointed museum donors, art history department professors, and unsuspecting members of the public intently reading those words so seriously.

Should I caution them? Should I warn them that those imperious museum object labels that appear so definitive and confident were written by… a grad student? Should I sidle up and ask if it makes sense?

Last semester, I interned for the dean of the Sam Fox School of Art and Design as he curated his exhibition On the Margins, a show of (very!) contemporary art which explores themes of war, disaster and displacement. I functioned largely as a research assistant, compiling files on each of the artists and artworks, assembling an annotated bibliography for sources dealing with visual depictions of war and disaster, composing artist biographies for the exhibition catalogue and writing wall text.

While the act of writing artist biographies and wall text is not in and of itself exhilarating, the payoff is — as this weekend proved — rather extraordinary. First off, it makes for a nice line on the good ol’ professional curriculum vitae. Second, wealthy museum donors invite you to quite lovely private receptions where you will be fed bacon-wrapped scallops, mini crab cakes, and excellent wine. Third, you get invited to tag along with the artists who come into town for the exhibition opening. This means that you get to go on a private tour of the Putlizer Foundation’s Dan Flavin exhibition with Mrs. Pulitzer, assorted area curators, and artists Willie Doherty, Willie Cole, Jane Hammond, and Thaddeus Stroud. It’s all very surreal.

Also, you feel slightly obligated to wear more black than usual so you can fit in with the curators.

The moral of the story, dear reader and visitor-of-museums, is that you should never fully entrust yourself to the wall text. It may have been written by a grad student who just needed to get a good meal.

I’ve stopped apologizing for long gaps in my blogging attempts. When writing fancy academic things is your daily grind, it can be hard to code switch to witty, more public-friendly banter. So, good visual culture historian that I am, here are roughly the equivalent of seven thousand words, summarizing my winter break and subsequent return to the hallowed pink granite halls of learning:

Week 1:

Not yet free, I grade final exams where students tell me ridiculous things about Manet.

Week 2:

St. Louis has its biggest snow since ancient times. I am addicted to making snow angels and singing along to Over the Rhine’s Christmas album.

Week 3:

In the culinary paradise of my in-laws’ home in Houston, my sisters and I create a veritable masterpiece: a gingerbread savannah. In 3-d.

Week 4:

I grow deeply attached to my Christmas gift: riding boots.

Week 5:

Home.

Week 6:

We get our very own Roomba. Suddenly, we come home to a clean rug every day. Lives change. The faint sound of rejoicing angels is heard.

Week 7:

I get my thesis chapter back from my adviser, begin TAing for Intro to Modern, clean out the basement, return to choir, and finally get a Missouri driver’s license. But perhaps most importantly, I realize that my Mac’s Photobooth application got an upgrade with Leopard.

Huzzah! I am 58 pages closer to a graduate degree in Contemporary Art and Theory.

Four days ago, my dining room floor looked like this:

When I taught writing at Cov, I would occasionally frighten hapless students by whipping out a pair of scissors and announcing that we were going to cut up their essays. I am a big believer in slicing up essays. In real life. There is something so productive and material and satisfying about physically playing with the order of an essay that even Microsoft Word’s scissor icon can’t quite approximate.

After a satisfying round with my scissors, some tape, and scrap paper, things started to come together:

Yay. The final few projects of the semester seem far more manageable after taming this beast.

A few days ago, Noel forwarded me an e-mail relaying key information about his upcoming company Christmas party.

All,
The attire for the Holiday party is any of the following… Festive, After-Five, Business Casual, (No Jeans Please)

To me, this this dress code is, indeed, inscrutable. Having chosen the life and career path that leads through the extended labyrinths of academia, where professors dress in anything from turtlenecks with gypsy skirts to full-body ensembles in eggplant. Occasionally, there is a sweater vest involved. Also, mismatched earrings.

Emerging from this context, these random and randomly capitalized words — “Festive,” “After Five,” “Business Casual” — seem obtuse, exclusionary, and even foreboding. Had I not done my research on Google, I may have assumed that “Festive” would be fulfilled by wearing something like:

Turns out, “Festive” is just code for “sparkly.” A shiny blouse, some sort of extravagant bling, a sequin or two. It remains unclear if this reported definition of “Festive” means Noel should wear something like this:

“After Five” is also problematic. To simply declare a particular type of attire “After Five” presumes a hegemonic consensus on what one wears post-five o’clock. What about class? What about race? What about gender? It’s colonial, really. And, should you be wondering, at this time of year, after I finish with school, I am most likely to be wearing this after five:

And, judging from extant literature on the subject (which is how we roll in grad school), the definition of “Business Casual” is still fraught. Even Noel’s company cannot trust its employees to correctly interpret the coded phrase without the helpful parentheses: “(No jeans).” If business folks don’t know what it means then, really, how much hope can I really have?

On the other hand, given the sheer range of formality and, um, tastefulness, of attire at last year’s party, perhaps giving a suggested attire — no matter how inscrutable — is still an improvement.

Now to go buy that elf costume…

While growing up in Hawaii had distinct advantages, fresh and affordable Christmas trees were not numbered among those perks. When I was especially wee, my parents bought small, rather scrawny trees from the parking lot of Foodland; unfortunately, I was so young that they had to place the precious evergreen in the playpen for its own protection. By the time I was in grade school, however, my dad had decided that his allergies could no longer endure a month of expensive agony and we bought a surprisingly furry artificial tree. My parents told us that its shaggy appearance had to do with its attempt to approximate a Canadian Pine.

Whatever.

My mom, however, continued to harbor a deep and persistent love of the smell of evergreens. Every year, she and I would go on a special “smelling” date. After completing a grocery shopping excursion, we would detour into the temporary tents set up in the market parking lot. We would watch the men spray the foamy fake “snow” onto trees at customers’ requests, marvel at the amazing shrinkage which occurred during the tree-netting process, and, then, burrow our noses into the spicy, woodsy branches. Having secured our Christmas smelling fix, we could proceed with the rest of the holiday season.

So imagine my utter delight when, during our year of dating, I realized that Noel — who sometimes seems to be allergic to most airborne plant matter — was not allergic to Christmas trees. Sweet joy indeed. In anticipation of our third Christmas together, we brought our chosen conifer home today, lugged the Christmas boxes up from the basement, and sipped Noel’s amazing peppermint hot chocolate while we decked the tree, primarily with Noel’s extensive collection of childhood ornaments.

There is something about setting up our own little Christmas tree, tucked into the corner of our dining room, that asserts our family-ness. And there is something about being able to smell a Christmas tree every day, rather than just in the parking lot of Foodland, that is a strange but delightful perk to being an adult on the mainland.

As April and I reluctantly drove Rachel to the airport on Saturday morning, our buckets — our metaphorical storage containers for emotion — started to leak. The part of life where you don’t get to live with or right next to your best friends is probably a result of the Fall.

Noel and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We eschewed blood relatives this time around, and instead celebrated with old roommates, laughing about old times, but also excitedly participating in the now of each person’s life. We talked about new relationships, new churches, new programs of study, new heights and depths of cooking and cleanliness. It is so precious to see how these relationships have persisted, despite distance and changing seasons. These people are woven into my heart in surprisingly tight ways.

I am humbled to have these friendships. I am thankful that Noel and I have a little home where old friends can come and relax and be known. I am content, knowing that another Thanksgiving reunion will certainly come.

(Blogging between rounds of grading has proved difficult. My thesis research is consuming, and as I struggle to put thoughts into sentences coherent by academic standards, I have little desire to re-translate into summary or self-critical form for my reading public. But, lucky for you, faithful, returning reader of this blog…the second exam is in hand, providing me with ample fodder for nerdy giggles.)

A public service announcement regarding this painting:

I freely admit that this is not the most famous of paintings. The colors are dark, the subjects look sad, and the suggested narrative is reasonably obscure. And yet, cultured reader and member of the public, there are a few things I would like you to know.

Contrary to the answers of several of my students, this is not a fine example of the Early Renaissance period. This is not, in fact, painted by Masaccio. A work by Masaccio, Early Renaissance master as he was, looks more like the this:

Further, the painting in question is not, as reported by other students, painted by Peter Paul Rubens. Although you, fine reader, were not in attendance during the class lecture on Rubens — where his penchant for rosy, fleshy, tumbling women was repeated ad nauseum — you may be familiar with the common reference to a “Rubenesque” build. Upon careful examination of first painting, I would argue, quite strongly, that there is nary a peaches and cream confection of a woman in sight. The absence of such plump femininity would, I hope, temper any desire to attribute this work to Rubens. It was not so for my students, but perhaps, now, you will choose more wisely.

The painting in question is, in fact, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, from 1606. It is not, as another student proclaimed, A Suicide, and it is most definitely not The Deposition. The painting is remarkable in several aspects, not least of which is the uncharacteristically somber and realistic treatment of Mary’s death. Instead of a shiny, floating Virgin being ushered into the heavens by putti, Caravaggio paints a pale, slightly green, and decidedly dead woman surrounded by stricken mourners. This unflinchingly naturalistic depiction of death likely contributed to the decision by Caravaggio’s intended patron, Laerzio Cherubini, to reject the painting. Ironically, Peter Paul Rubens — who painted a rather luscious Assumption of the Virgin himself — appreciated Caravaggio’s skill and innovation and convinced the Duke of Mantua to buy the work instead.

This message is sponsored by the Society of Type A Art Historians and Tired TAs with the hope for a brighter future where our young people remember that the names of old masters are not, in fact, interchangeable.

As previously mentioned, I currently TAing for Intro to Western Art. The first quiz has come and gone, leaving a trail of special moments in its wake. In anticipation of the students submitting their midterm essays on Thursday, I look back, fondly, at what I learned during the initial round of grading:

Best first sentences:

• “History is bloody.”
• “Every culture has images.”

Broadest Claims. Ever.

• “Art has been the most important form of propaganda in the west for thousands of years.”
• “Therefore, the true measure of a civilization can only be is its artwork.”
• “We can clearly see that art is very much an uninterrupted process which amazingly is able to surpass the barriers of distance and time, and maintain a sense of continuity.”

Wish I could give creativity points:

• Squid Bottle
  Artist Unknown
  2000 BC
  Ancient Greece (Right. It’s actually known as the Minoan Octopus Flask, but at least we got the name of a cephalopod.)

• “A popular theory is that [the pyramids] point to specific stars for protection of the pyramids’ contents. But perhaps there were never stars there at all. Maybe those stars are actually pharaohs that have made the full journey into the afterlife.”