sisterhood of the classical realists

First, let's talk about how I keep forgetting this guy's name and have on more than one occasion looked him up by Googling his better-known wife, who is the author of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series and who I imagine he may resent for this very reason. (Because surely I can't be the only person guilty of playing this bizarro game of Six Degrees of Blake Lively whenever I feel like staring listlessly at some irritatingly perfect figure paintings that I'm not even necessarily sure I like all that much but-- but would you just LOOK at that SHEET.)

But, yes. Jacob Collins. A girl who graduated from Centre a few years ago now attends his school, and I've seen a small selection of her work. It's baffling. It looks computer-generated. It's made up of these teeny-tiny little pinpoints of graphite. And when I say I've seen a small selection of her work I mean that I've seen probably close to all of what she did in a year, because each drawing is the result of hours upon hours of work each day for weeks or a month at a time. Each drawing. Most of the drawings were still lifes of casts, but some were drawn from models. Live models, real people, which means these people STAND THERE with their arms held out for all those hours on all those days of all those weeks that the artists are working in a tiny cramped little studio in Manhattan. I can't decide which side of that easel I would rather be on less, and thinking about it makes me want to drink all this beer instead of spending who knows how long painting it. And I don't even like beer, so don't let me get started on this.

lumbricus terrestris

I will never stop being deeply unsettled by displaced earthworms in the rain.

a postcard, a record

With this kind of weather, it's no wonder I can't make any important decisions around this place. Like what to do with my life, and what to wear to the opera tonight.

mantidae to essay ratio update

It's almost a month into the semester, and up until this point I have seen more praying mantises than I have had writing assignments. In fact, I should rather say that we have had more weird insect plagues than I have had writing assignments. That is, if you count the evening several weeks ago on which, for approximately one hour (during which, naturally, I was supposed to be landscape painting), campus turned into one giant fuzzy grey cloud of gnats (with a side of coughing cyclists). This week, it was praying mantises, of which I have seen two. I know, not exactly a plague, but that's two more praying mantises than I can remember ever seeing in the rest of my lifetime, so it's something. There was one on the window of my dorm room, and one on Sheldon's pant leg when he arrived for Wednesday's life drawing session.



As of this weekend, it seems, Centre's regularly scheduled programming returns, the bugs get a break, and I'm finally, all at once, reminded what school is usually like:

Monday
-ARH 260 paper due
-ARH 260 midterm exam #1
-Writing Center 8-10pm

Tuesday
-ARS 220 sketchbook
-ARS 220 bone studies (two life-size views each, in charcoal, of humerus, femur, scapula, pelvis)
-ENG 301 complete reading and write paper (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
-First 100 or so pages of All the King's Men, plus a smattering of additional Robert Penn Warren handouts for ENG 373
-Writing Center 7-9pm

Wednesday
-ARS 220 life drawing session 7-9:30

Thursday
-ENG 301 in-class written exam (including memorization of 10-line passage),
-The next hundred pages of All the King's Men


Somewhere in there, I am determined to bake a cake and have a gin and tonic or two.

to let it be or not to let it be

These days I'm agonizing over whether or not to get my first real haircut since the headshave in April. One of the shavee girls got a really cute cut at a salon in Louisville last week, and Mary has an appointment for this weekend, when she'll be going home to Cincinnati. Last week I was on the verge of walking up the street to a barber shop and asking for a traditional men's cut, because I'm not sure which of the inordinately high number of Danville salons are trustworthy. Instead, I began parting my hair on the opposite side of my head now that the cowlick in my hairline is less noticeable, and for a little while the haircut hankering abated. For the last couple of days, though, I've been wearing especially girly clothes in an effort to distract from the fact that my life has turned into one big 1964 Paul McCartney costume party.

squelchy, crispy, fluffy (and in that order)

Mary and I have gotten in the habit of taking morning walks from our dormitory to the Danville Bellevue Cemetery and back. If it weren't for the ginormous blisters I got after wearing flat boots with bad insoles on one such walk last Tuesday, we probably would have taken one every day this week. These blisters were epic enough to give them names, so we've been calling them Pete and Pete. The Pete on my right foot, which, like the Pete on the left, grew from the size of a nickel to the size of a Kennedy dollar in about an hour. It actually migrated from its original location on the bottom of my heel, crawling out and up the side of my foot, where it bulged out like a translucent little mushroom, about the size of a gumdrop. Turns out that blister-popping is a controversial topic, so I went to the campus clinic to see if they'd do something about it for me, but all they did was tell me to leave it alone and to come back if it got infected or if I thought I had the swine flu. Good advice, turns out, because my body has done its thing and reabsorbed all those lovely blistery juices, and aside from a weird peanut-shaped blob of looseish skin on each of my feet, Pete and Pete are pretty much gone from my life.

Which means that this morning our walks officially resumed. We took our usual route across campus and through the Presbyterian churchyard, then turned off Main to 5th Street. Just as Mary pointed out a particularly cute squirrel doing squirrelly little things in a flower bed a few yards away from us, we heard a loud ZZHHHRRRREEUNNGHHHH from above us and across the street. We turned just in time to see another squirrel, thoroughly fried and quite dead before it hit the ground, land with a muffled thunk, little feet outstretched and stiff, eyes wide open, on its back at the base of a telephone pole. This is not the first dead squirrel I have encountered since starting this blog (though it is certainly the fresher of the two), so I would like to announce a new tag for your blog-archive-browsing convenience, in the event that this becomes a larger motif in my life, "rodent death."

In hopes that it does not, and aware that sloths are not rodents, I present you (with thanks to Cute Overload) with A Photo of a Baby Sloth:

last first day no. 1

I realize that today is not actually my last first day of classes at Centre-- there's Centre Term in January, when I'll be taking a single painting course all day every day for three weeks, and of course spring term-- but I feel the need to pretend that today is somehow more momentous than it really is.

I got my half of the room set up on Saturday, after disassembling the unnecessarily complex furniture configuration that greeted me. The bed is now only slightly lofted-- high enough to fit the dresser beneath it but low enough not to guarantee falling to my death on the way to pee in the middle of the night. Lautaro played the good boyfriend and carried all my heavy stuff in for me (like my stacking drawer set, crammed full of vacuum-packed panties, which I swore would not fall apart while he was carrying it, but which did, leaving me frantically gathering up floral-printed bras from the elevator floor lest someone's father see). The bras were the only thing not packed in Space Bags, so everything else was fine. Have I talked about Space Bags on this thing yet? No?

Let me tell you about Space Bags. They are almost as amazing as the infomercials and packaging claim them to be. Sure, when you open the bags, your stuff emerges looking sad and wrinkled and upset with you. But the memories of the fun you had sucking the life out of your every fabric belonging as you packed will far outweigh any and all negative side effects. It's a miracle Mom and I didn't end up with spine injuries last week when we were packing my clothes and bed linens up. You should have seen us wallowing around on the floor, shouting and laughing over the noise of the vacuum, trying to keep the attachment stuck to the Space Bag valves, insisting on throwing our bodies across the bags to help push the air out, slipping and sliding on the plastic when, really, the point of Space Bags is that you don't have to do that. Packing is always more fun when it involves loud noises and you look like a badly trained walrus.

But they work pretty darn well. For the first time, I managed to get all of my stuff here in one Subaru load.

Last night, following the only Opening Convocation ever held in the gym during my time at Center (Newlin is under much-needed rennovation; if you've ever visited the mezzanine of the United Nations General Assembly hall, imagine that times ten but minus the corduroy and you will understand the level of ugly we are dealing with) and a hall meeting, lovely roommate (of 2.5 years!) Mary and I celebrated the new room with orange juice and Pisang, the only alcohol my parents could be swindled out of. And trust me, this stuff was willingly given. A gift from frequent Amsterdam visitor Uncle Tom, it is swamp-ooze-green banana liqueur, at its "best" with 2/3 orange juice. We slept well.

This morning we woke up early, grabbed breakfast, and took a chilly but pleasant walk around campus before my one and only class of Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays: a 9:10, the first half of the Western art history survey, which I'm a little embarrassed I haven't already taken. This afternoon I picked up my art supply order and clumsily transported it to the Art Barn, then took Haley and Kathy to the bookstore. I somehow came back to the room with Haley's bag of Centre t-shirts instead of my Flannery O'Connor paperback and art studio texts. For now, I'm waiting for it to be six o'clock, because that means Dinner at Six, our tradition, because we are not-so-secret old ladies.