Writing Recommendation Letters Friday, Nov 17 2006 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 2:28 pm

It’s recommendation season, and I’m swamped with letters to write. In general, I like writing these letters about as much as I like grading (ugh!). It’s not a genre of writing that we’re really trained in. Plus, sometimes I end up writing letters for students that I’m not totally behind, which is difficult, since I don’t want to lie and say a student is wonderful if I really think that s/he is only mediocre. But I’m a sucker that way; I find it difficult to say no, especially if I feel that I’m someone’s last resort.

But this year is different. All of the people I’m writing for — 3 MA or former MA students and 5 or 6 undergraduates — are all students I believe in, which perhaps makes it all the more difficult. I want to write them each the best letter I can, because I really think they deserve to go on to a graduate program. I certainly don’t want to be the reason one of them doesn’t get to do what s/he wants to do.

As I write these particular letters, however, I find myself getting into a funk, especially as I write some of the undergraduates’ recommendations. There’s a group of them that I’m really quite fond of, and now they’re all graduating. For the first time, I feel the cyclical nature of being a professor: every few years, a new crop of undergraduates show up, stick around for a while, and then graduate.

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Philadelphia Museums, Among Others Tuesday, Nov 14 2006 

museums thisgaudygildedstage 10:13 pm

One last Philadelphia post. While PJ and I were in Philly last week, I had the opportunity to visit a couple of non-eighteenth-century-related museums. I’ve been wanting to write a little about museums in general, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to post my thoughts on museums in general and the Philadelphia Art Museum, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and one or two other museums in particular.

I love museums. Art museums, science museums, historical museums. It doesn’t matter. But not all museums are created equally. Some really work, and some don’t. Maybe it’s obvious, but it seems to me that a museum should educate its patrons about its subject(s). I not only want to see great art and artifacts; I also want to be able to learn more about the ones that strike my fancy. For me, a museum is successful when I leave wanting to read more about something I say in it, an artist, a particular painting, or a historical event. When PJ and I visited Spain last summer, for example, I came away from the Museo del Prado wanting to know more about the work of Diego Velazquez, so I bought a book about his work from the museum’s store, which I read on the plane back. Since then, I’ve also watched a documentary on his painting “The Rokeby Venus,” which I’ve since seen at the National Gallery in London.

My two favorite museums thus far are the the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the National Portrait Gallery in London. I’ve always had a tendency to love Asian art. As a budding gay teen, for example, I dreamed of someday decorating my bedroom in a Japanese motif. I now love House of Flying Daggers, which is Chinese, of course. And I’ve started collecting images of Ganesh (mostly postcards and photos of sculptures in museums). So, when PJ and I were in SF last May, I went to the Asian Art Museum while he was at a conference. I had never been to a museum dedicated exclusively to Asian art. It was wonderful. It has excellent holdings from each nationality/ethnic group. And I felt genuinely educated about the works and their historical contexts. I bought two books there: The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco: Selected Works and A Curious Affair: The Fascination between East and West, a book about a special exhibit on five centuries of interaction between Asian countries and the west.

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The Queen: A Review Monday, Nov 13 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 2:53 pm

While we were in Philadelphia, PJ and I saw Stephen Frears’s The Queen starring Helen Mirren. I’ve loved Helen Mirren at least since I saw her in Where Angels Fear to Tread. She is also great in Prime Suspect 3, The Madness of King George, Gosford Park, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Mirren’s performance in The Queen is no exception: she’s brilliant.

The Queen explores the royal family’s response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, a response predicated on tradition and decorum, and juxtaposes it with that of the country’s new prime minister, Tony Blair, played by Michael Sheen, who has been elected to “modernize” the country. Filling out the primary cast of characters are James Cromwell as Prince Philip, Sylvia Syms as the Queen Mother, Alex Jennings as Prince Charles, and Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair.

A Granada production, the movie seems a little made-for-tv at times. The film’s point and its depiction of some of the royals stand out as good examples of this. First, over the course of the movie, Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth must learn to surrender some of her WWII-era notions of the sovereign’s duties, and Sheen’s Blair (and his Labour ministers) must learn to respect the traditional role of the monarchy. While this might be oversimplifying the movie’s point just a bit, it’s only just a bit. I was expecting something a little more complex.

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Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Sunday, Nov 12 2006 

travel thisgaudygildedstage 3:20 pm

PJ and I got back from Philadelphia yesterday evening. Since he was busy at his conference most of the time we were there, my goal was to check out a few museums and other attractions around the city.

This was the fourth time I’ve visited Philadelphia since 2000. My first visit was to present a paper at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The conference organizers emphasized how many eighteenth-century-related sites there are to see in Philly, but I didn’t actually see many of them while I was at that conference. In 2003, PJ and I went to Philly for vacation. We spent most of that trip seeing Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Benjamin Franklin sites, and the Philadelphia Art Museum. In 2004, we went back for a meeting of the North American Conference for British Studies. We were there with a couple of friends, so we spent most of our time on that trip hanging out with them.

So, I wanted to take the opportunity to see more of the eighteenth-century sites and to learn more about eighteenth-century Philadelphia on this trip. I didn’t get to see everything I wanted — I had a habit of showing up when things were closed or when a long line of school children had just lined up at the door. But I go a little taste of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and I know what I want to see when I go back.

Benjamin Franklin (1785)One of my first stops was the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which has a very good, if small, museum. I especially enjoyed seeing works by members of the Peale family. Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his brother James Peale (1749-1831) were painters. Charles Willson Peale studied under British painter Benjamin West and then taught his brother and several of his children to paint. These children included Raphaelle Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale, Titian Peale, and Angelica Kauffman Peale. His portrait of Benjamin Franklin in 1785 (right) is just one of his famous portraits, a genre in which he excelled. This painting is on display at the PAFA. Rembrandt Peale become one of the most important American painters of the early nineteenth century.

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Philly Wednesday, Nov 8 2006 

Uncategorized thisgaudygildedstage 8:46 am

PJ and I are off to Philadelphia until Saturday. He’s presenting at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference. I’m just tagging along to visit Philly again. I hope to blog about my touristing when I get back.

Until then, happy Democratic election victory!

 

Performing Blackness on English Stages Monday, Nov 6 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:42 pm

I just finished reading Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, another work on the list of books I’m reviewing. This book examines instances of blackface on the English stage from the late Medieval period through the eighteenth century. Overall, it’s a good book. I especially like its early description of how early modern actors (and eventually actresses) ‘blackened’ themselves by using makeup composed of burnt cork or coal or by wearing a mask on stage.

Since I am reviewing it formally in my review essay to be published next year (presumably), I will again leave the details of a formal review to that essay. Instead, I’d like to reflect briefly on how this book has gotten me thinking about my next graduate course. I’d like to teach a course specifically on Restoration literature, focusing exclusively on 1660 to 1688. I’d also like for about half of readings for this course to be comprised of plays, since the Restoration is mostly known for its drama.

Reading Performing Blackness on English Stages reminds me a bit of Cynthia Lowenthal’s Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, an excellent book published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2003. I’m struck by how I’d like to incorporate more of the issues raised by these studies in my class. Of particular interest to me at the moment is race and how the theater could allow Restoration society to try out its constructions of race and see if they worked. I’m also interested in doing more with religion, depictions of Islam in particular.

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Marie Antoinette: A Review Sunday, Nov 5 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 8:01 pm

Weekend posts are clearly going to be about entertainment.

Today PJ and I saw Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a dazzlingly beautiful tribute to Versailles, eighteenth-century French fashion (especially shoes), and cake. Kirsten Dunst is quite good in it, as is Jason Swartzmann. I also thought that the modernized soundtrack worked well.

On the downside, the film’s obsession with these visual and aural elements ultimately seem to substitute for any particular point of view. We are given a sympathetic vision of Marie Antoinette but one can’t help but wonder why. Why give us this portrait now? Likewise, the film doesn’t seem as interested in historical events as it does in showing us Marie Antoinette’s good humor, fondness for cake, and loneliness. The less informed audience members (like me) find it difficult to follow the film’s leaps through time. On the one hand, the actors show little sign of aging. On the other hand, the film covers some 20 years in Marie Antoinette’s life.

On the whole, this is an entertaining, if somewhat empty tribute to the style, protocols, and excesses of the Bourbon court. It is a feast for the eyes, but I would have liked it better if it had also aspired to move or educate me.

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El Mar (2000): A Review Saturday, Nov 4 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 9:46 pm

Tonight we watched a Spanish film we rented from netflix, El Mar. Excuse my French, but I just have to say that this film is fucked up — and not in a good way.

The movie starts during the Spanish Civil War. Three children, two boys and a girl, witness a series of violent acts, which leaves them emotionally scarred. We meet up with them again a decade later. One of the boys has become a prostitute, one has become a religious zealot who uses the rituals of his faith to sublimate his desire for the male prostitute, and the girl has become a nun. (She too seems to be in love with the slutty one.)

The cinematography is excellent. And the religious zealot/gay boy is kind of cute. But apart from those two qualities, this movie is just fucked up. At first I thought it might be using tuberculosis as a metaphor for AIDS or something, which might have been interesting. But I don’t think that’s what it was really doing. Then I thought that it might be a critique of Catholicism’s sexual repressiveness. But that didn’t seem right either. By the film’s penultimate scene, a climactic confrontation between the two young men, I just didn’t care anymore what it was trying to do.

And I won’t even discuss the gratuitous and rather graphic violence against a cat, which is almost impossible to watch if you like animals at all. The film passes this violence off as little more than a plot point; the perpetrator is immediately forgiven and the act is dismissed as just one more example of his violent anger, but this anger doesn’t seem meant to turn the audience against him. Instead, the film doesn’t seem to know what we’re supposed to think about most of what happens in it.

One critic maintains that

The message is clear: Children learn the ways of the world early. They take the horrors they see in childhood with them into adulthood and express them in their own new horrific ways. It’s a depressing concept, but it makes for interesting stories.

Horrific, yes. Depressing, maybe. Interesting, not really. I’ll take sweet German coming out films over horrific Spanish ones any day!

Again, here’s the trailer:

 

Summer Storm (2004): A Review Friday, Nov 3 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 11:45 pm

PJ and I wanted to see Marie Antoinette this evening, but the sound wasn’t working correctly in the theater, and so everyone was told to come back another time. So, we ended up getting a refund and coming home to watch one of the movies we have from netflix, a German film entitled Summer Storm.

In many ways, this movie is a very typical, paint by numbers high school coming out film, but I thought that it was kind of touching, even if simplistic. It’s about the captain of a Bavarian crew team, named Tobi, who is in love with his best friend. The two go off to summer camp with their team, where Tobi and his teammates interact with another team comprised of gay boys. This of course brings everything out in the open: his teammates’ homophobia, his sexuality, and his unrequited love for his friend.

Tobi’s sexual awakening is rather sweet, but I’m a sucker for coming out movies so I’m probably being a little too easy on it. It’s kind of a combination of Get Real, Nico and Dani, and one scene from Y tu mama tambien, all movies that I really like. The conflicts are resolved a little too quickly and ultimately it doesn’t really do anything new or even very special with its subject matter, but overall I can’t help but like it. Maybe I just wish I had been part of a German crew team when I was 17 or so and had fallen in with another high school team of queer boys!

Here’s the trailer, which is appropriately cheesy:

 

“We Other Victorians” Thursday, Nov 2 2006 

academia thisgaudygildedstage 11:07 pm

Tonight was the first meeting of my department’s new 19th-century reading group. My current project will extend into the 19th century, so I’ve decided to use this group as an opportunity to reconnect with the period. I am reminded that, as an undergraduate, I specialized in 19th-century European history in my course work, and I took a few 19th-century lit courses as a graduate student. Last year, I chaired a search committee to hire a Victorianist. So, I look forward to this reconnection.

The meeting went very well. We read an essay about periodization and whether there really was a “Victorian period.” The conversation was a lot of fun, and I think we all look forward to our next meeting in January.

One of the things that struck me about the article was that many of the phenomena the writer discusses actually “began” (if debates about or issues of class, gender, empire, sexuality, science, state power, etc. can ever really be said to “begin” in any particular period) in the 18th century.

During the search last year, I frequently joked with my colleagues about the idea of the long 18th century, the idea that the 18th century extends from about 1649 or 1660 to about 1820 or 1832, depending on who’s making the argument. Now I wonder if the 18th century shouldn’t be even longer — perhaps to the 1850s!

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