Suburb of Heaven

Well, back from the road, but about to head out again in a few days. Here are some photos from Syracuse, NY - mostly of the Everson Museum and works therein.


I.M. Pei's first museum building. Lots of concrete. A really impressive interior, an exterior I think could use a little softening.

( the knitting porcupine )

Plus I was fed at an incredible restaurant named Sparky Town (amazing lentil soup and mushroom-cheese quiche, plus brownies to die for) and wandered around the Armory Square area and had a coffee at a place called Freedom of Espresso. All in all, a very nice trip.

An unusually busy Saturday, starting out with a meeting to sort out details of a charity thingamabob that Bemo and I are volunteering for. It takes place at the local children's zoo, so we got to hang out by the two-kinds-of-stork-flamingo-whistling duck-vulturine guinea fowl area. It was early in the morning, so everybody was stretching their legs, doing various beak-clatter things, and hopping around. We spent some time watching the storks scoop up their morning meal (in the case of the European storks, a mouse each and some nice little fish that the guinea fowl tried to steal) and laughing endlessly at the whistling ducks, which marched out of their pen in a straight line, making noises not unlike a platoon of squeaky toys being stepped on by an elephant. Bemo fell in love, and now wants to fill our apartment with whistling ducks, but I fear our bathtub won't be quite enough for them.

Then, a very good breakfast at The Egg and I, a new place in town (I think it's a franchise dealiee, so I'm sure there are a bunch of them out there) that opened up a few weeks ago.

Then off to the library book sale. Our acquisitions, to the tune of eight dollars, consist of a ton of Real Simple magazines (I rarely buy them new, but I like their recipes), some Architectural Digest mags (ditto, except in place of "recipes" put "pictures of houses," and a heap of old-to-very-old Gourmet magazines. I also got a hardbound copy of four Mary Stewart novels (Touch Not The Cat, The Gabriel Hounds, This Rough Magic, and My Brother MIchael) that I may give to my sister, since I already own them all, Jacqueline Winspear's An Incomplete Revenge (a retry of the Maisie Dobbs books, since I tried the first one and really disliked it), When IN Rome by Ngaio Marsh, The THirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, Herriot's All Creatures Great And Small (a replacement of a former copy), Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong, God is an Englishman by R.F. Delderfield, Wrestling with Gravy, by Jonathan Reynolds, a small book discussing Sir Gawain and Pearl, Dennis Miller's I Rant Therefore I Am (bathroom reading for Bemo), Bennett Cerf's Bumper Crop (bathroom reading for both of us), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (wanted to read it for ages), Nicci French's The Memory Game, and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, since it's been a long time since I read it.

Not bad for eight bucks and change, huh?

After that, we dropped a huge amount of money at Target, mostly for meds, picked up groceries from the Hy-Vee and Trader Joe's, and went home to offload. I ducked into the office for about an hour to clean up a bit and run through a list of photographs I'm working with, and then back home, where I am in the process of making giant batches of turkey meatballs to serve as meals for later on. Two batches have been cooked, and I'll probably freeze much of the rest of it.

Tomorrow will be all fussing about Rome, and printing out the tests for the kiddies. I am bringing in TJ's chocolate cat cookies to ease them through their test.

( under here )

My excitement about the teaching gig may be for naught - the class meets Tues-Thurs from about ten to eleven, and it's a half-hour to get there and a half-hour back. That may eat up too much of my regular work time. Since the job isn't at the uni I currently work for, it may be a little harder to finagle. I'll have a conversation with my director and see if there's a way to work around it (he's the one always stressing connection-building!) but if it can't be done I'll have to pass on the class.

Bah. I should have guessed it wouldn't be an evening class - schools hereabouts are not much into "nontraditional" class schedules, as they don't have big populations of students who are fitting classes in while they work.

Was sifting through my old Art History ABC entries, where I did an essay on an art history topic for each letter of the alphabet (click the tag to see them if you'd like) and came across a poem by Michelangelo I posted. I thought I'd share it again.

What file's incessant bite
left this old hide so shrunken, frayed away,
my poor sick soul? When is it due, the day
that sloughs it off, and heaven receives you, where
in primal joy and light
you lived, unvexed by the perilous flesh you wear?
Though I change hide and hair
with little life ahead,
no way to change behavior long engrained,
cramping me all the more as years go by.
I'm envious, Love, I swear
(why hide it?) of the dead,
a panicky muddle-head,
my soul in terror of its sensual tie.
Lord, as the last hours fly,
stretch out in mercy your two arms; make me
less what I've been, more what you'd have me be.
Michelangelo, Poem 161 to Vittoria Colonna.

One of my favorite pieces of art ev-ah. Il Magnifico himself, wonky nose and all. (He had no sense of smell, interestingly enough.) I visit this sculpture every time I'm anywhere near the National Gallery. It's terracotta, and likely made after the wax sculptures crafted by Benitendi and designed by Verrochio, which were placed in various churches to offer thanks that he escaped the Pazzi murder plot.



This is Lorenzo's hottie younger brother, Giuliano, who didn't make it out of the Duomo alive.

My little camera, as great as it is, doesn't handle low light levels very well at all, and most of the resulting photos are on the blurry to very blurry spectrum. There are great photos of the stained glass in Chartres out there, so if you're particularly interested a little bit of searching should turn up some good stuff for you.

So.

Chartres, pt. 1

Chartres, pt. 2

So, onward into part three!

( rays of colored light )

Way back before my surgery, (only a few weeks, but it feels like decades) I put up part one of my trip to Chartres. Here's part two.

( Saints in their multitudes )

I'll put up pt. 3 soon (and this time I really mean soon!) It'll be of the interior, and the stained glass program. Ooh, and the labyrinth, although my photos of that aren't great because there were chairs all over it.

Abraham cups Isaac's face. They both stand on top of the substitution ram.

Have successfully raided the used bookstore and come home with loot. I'm slowly building up my Heyer collection, since buying the newly reprinted ones is a little spendy. So today I came home with Cotillion, Lady of Quality, Sylvester, and Pistols for Two.

I also came home with a few Gothics from the sixties, including one that claims "surpasses Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt." I highly doubt that this person, Anne Maybury, can outdo Mary Stewart, but I'm curious to read it anyway. It's called The Terracotta Palace and the back blurb reads, "Where is Vanessa Malimbrosa? Juliet Holdroyd wants to know...and nothign the very strange, very rich Malimbrosa family can do will keep her from the twisted truth hidden in a fabulous villa in Rome." Oooh, fabulous villas in Rome containing twisted truths are right up my alley.

The other two Gothics I got are Ride A White Dolphin, also by Anne Maybury, set in Venice (squee!) and Midsummer Masque by Jill Tattersall. Midsummer Masque involves a young orphaned and penniless woman working as a companion for an old lady living on a mysterious estate called Gryphons. Hurrah for Gothic conventions! Of course, there's a murder and secrets and shadows - all properly indicated on the back cover blurb.

Currently, I'm finishing up a very good book Bemo got me for Christmas - one I'd been hoping for and was tickled pink to get. It's titled Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici by Miles J. Unger. I have quite a lot of Medici books around thanks to my Italy obsession, and any student of art history naturally gets to know the family quite a bit, but this is one of the better books I've read on the subject. For one, Unger is an art historian, and I appreciate the sensitivity with which he writes about the Medici relationships with art and artists. Secondly, he's neither a slavering Medici apologist (although he is, naturally, sensitive to his subject) nor a writer who judges Lorenzo from a modern, American standard. Rather, he does his best to show the reader the type of society Lorenzo lived in and moved through, as well as what his political aims and ambitions were. It's not as acholarly as it might be, and since there's probably an book to be written about each of Lorenzo's facets this book does have some topics which aren't gone into thorougly, but it's an engaging read about a man who, even after all these centuries, embodies his time period so perfectly.