Filed under: egg-lish
Starting last Friday night at around 8, and lasting (with some sleeping, a little bit of eating, and a shower figured in) until 6 pm Saturday night, I made my final haul on my sophomore project. This is the project that I first conceived of last May, when the idea of character sketches beat out a metal-working project that I considered. I stuck to literature, which was probably good news for everyone who will be walking through the Arts building this spring, where I won’t have work on display. But even more risky and exciting for me was that I undertook a project involving composition.
I just submitted my abstract in a request to present at the Steinmetz Symposium in the Spring, a cross-disciplinary Friday-Saturday event that constitutes the only day our school gives us off during the term (nothing for Easter, Martin Luther King Day, or anything else). The gist was the same old thing I feel like I’ve been saying or writing over and over for roughly my whole life: I have created a collection of character sketches imitating characters from famous works of literature. My focus has been on the process of reading characters in literature, and how characters are understood differently by different readers. That’s been pretty much it the whole time.
And as of two days ago, 31 single-spaced pages, 16,659 words later, I finally have something to show for these last nine months.
Now for a nap.
Yesterday my school, which doesn’t give us the day off for Marten Luther King Jr. Day, much less snow days, was gradually slowed to a stop by enormous quantities of beautiful beautiful snow. Officially, the only cancellation made by the school was to close down the administrative offices at noon and to close down some of the food kiosks in the Campus Center. Classes were held underneath the gathering two feet of snow that distorted the shapes of all familiar landmarks around campus, and buried smaller things like benches, bushes and cars.
I had a morning class: Latin. Our teacher offered some Catullus in the spirit of the day, and though I was sleepy, I was happy to be there. I walked through the snow to class that morning, starting out by walking to a less-frequented section of Campus near the President’s house, in order to get my forms from the registrar for classes next term. The campus had the deserted feeling that it usually has before the very early classes held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But then when I walked past the chapels into the central quad, I saw students walking around, as usual, but incumbered by the snow, making slow progress with their eyes squinting into the snow. Everything was obscured by whiteness, but underneath that, everything was also as usual.
Walking into the campus center, no one would have guessed that the paths outside were barely passable. Everyone was there, clubs had set up at tables seeking membership and money. There were few free seats at the tables in the common area. It was warm, and the light seemed very yellow after the white snow. This makes my list of things I love about my school.
But no one really did anything, all day. We all sat in the house together, doing nothing. Cooking. I had never watched pasta sauce being made from scratch before. I knew that a lot went into sauce, but I was surprised when a basic recipe required that the sauce be simmered for an hour and a half. I learned that I seem to like my pasta on the raw side of al dente. I had already baked enough to last us all day. I took a long nap, and then I took longer to wake up. It was a great Valentine’s Day, I said, my favorite.
Filed under: food
I had an idea, and without going into details, the most important part was that I bake some pound cake in my new loaf pan (glass, with a plastic lid, from Target), and take it on a train along with some fresh strawberries and sugar on a train. Then when I get to where I’m going, I pound the strawberries up with the sugar to make a sort of sauce for the pound cake. No whipped cream, unless we actually whip cream. I thought about conveying all of this in a canvas bag. It strikes me as quite romantic. I hope to do it in the spring. Which leaves me with two problems: when are strawberries in season? I somehow have a notion that it’s late summer, rather than spring, but I don’t actually know. Also, I don’t have a pound cake recipe. If anyone could help me out on either of those points, I’d appreciate it.
I also realized last night that I have a great dearth of poetry books here at school. I don’t have my well-loved Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, nor an anthology of any description. I only have Les Amours de Ronsard, Browning’s The Ring and The Book, The Canterbury Tales, and a little volume of obscure Milton.
Whereas what I do have is almost all of the dictionaries I own. I made an Amazon list for the curious.
The books people can’t be without can be quite telling, of course. I must search for some good examples of this. To be continued…
Filed under: egg-lish
A few years ago, I attended the wedding of a family friend with my parents and both of my sisters. The bride had had some lovely little place-markers made up–everything about the wedding could be described with the same word, in fact–in order to indicate the seating arrangements. We were close family friends, so we had a table very near the head table, and we had no sooner arrived at the reception from the church than we started bickering about whose names looked best in the fancy type on the name-cards.
I don’t mean to give anyone the wrong idea about the competitiveness of my family; we’re not usually all that competetive. But my name was the most attractive. Or, at least, it would have been, had my mother given me the full version of my name, Regina, from the start, rather than announcing to me at the age of 16 that she had made a mistake in legally bestowing the shortened “Gina”. Certainly, she had reasons: she didn’t want me to have to deal with too long of a first name in addition to my 11-character Italian whopper of a last name. But aesthetically, one needs more of a first name to set off a last name like that. Unfortunately, my generation will not have the opportunity to correct this folly, since my father was his father’s only son, and he had only girls. Nor are we strange and progressive enough to do I don’t know what in order to have children with our last name.
To get back to the point! There are names that look good, and there are names that are good. My name sounds good. Or maybe I only think so because I so frequently have to pronounce it for people (and am currently the only member of my immediate family who approaches the original Italian pronunciation in my version). But I flatter–who? myself, or my family?–that interviewers who have seen my name on applications feel some expectation and suspense in their curiosity before they have the gratification of meeting me and asking me how to pronounce my name. And, in fact, it is for the sake of all the people who see my last name and think “Now, how on earth could one pronounce that?” that I choose to pronounce it the correct way. Anything less would risk anticlimax.
Then, to abandon all pretences of having a point, I would like to present, as has been presented to me when this topic has come up, the name “Achilles” for your consideration. Achilles. Certainly even those who aren’t familiar with the Iliad or the story of the Trojan War get a sense of who Achilles must have been when they hear his name. Even as I type that, though, I can imagine to myself someone who would identify the name vaguely with Ancient Greece or, more broadly, with antiquity, and guess that it belonged to a philosopher.
The other day, also, sitting in French class, I had a thought that might be construed as applying. The classroom where my French class is held is equipped with a rather small dry-erase board, and my French teacher writes a lot of things on it, including some things that don’t seem to warrant the recording. Consequently, the board is erased many times throughout the course of the class period (which is nearly two hours), and the dry-erase marker erases very poorly when merely wiped off of the board. By the end of class, there is a whole mess of lines and clouds of blue and red covering the board. It will be very clear from what I am about to say that I am in no way a visual artist, least of all a photographer; please forgive me. It occurred to me to take a picture of the board in that state, with the overarching topic printed in large letters on top of the vestiges. For instance, I could take a picture of the board at the end of last class, having written on the top: “Descartes: <<Je pense, donc je suis>>”
As an afterthought, I’m filing this post in “glances”, since it has rather run away with me. But I’ll still try to tie things together a little bit. Here’s the website that made me think of the topic, with its name in large bold letters across the top: Catherine Servel
