south of the loop

I met with my preceptor this afternoon about the latest revision of my masters thesis. He thinks it is in pretty good shape, but he's all "argument, argument, argument." My advisor, on the other hand, is all "narrative, narrative, narrative." I would like to fall somewhere between the two and produce an excellent narrative with an implicit, but crystal clear, message. Something like you might find in The Atlantic Monthly (but not one of the cover stories, those are definitely explicitly argumentative). When I informed Preceptor that Advisor was pressuring me to foreground the narrative structure rather than the argument, Preceptor responded with, "Oh, well, okay!" And then five minutes later, said, "Yeah, I'm going to have to talk to Advisor. I don't know what the hell he means by that." Let me be clear that none of this is hostile talk, and I respect both Preceptor and Advisor immensely. However. Girl's got a thesis to finish. I think the two of them are going to have to duke it out while I finish this thing up. Countdown: rough draft due in three weeks, all polished and shiny.

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current book: still Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, and still vol. 1
current music: Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
current socks: dark green with white sheep and red letters exclaiming, "BAA!" They arrived in the mail a few months ago from a former co-worker who had traveled to New Zealand in December. The note said, "New Zealand was wonderful… but so many sheep!"

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Yeah, it's rough.

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When people ask me why I wanted to work in a museum, I usually describe the "aha! moment" I had when I saw that first Michelangelo in Oxford. It's not the best phrase, maybe, but it does the work I want it to: it describes in humble language (I didn't want to describe it as an "epiphany," for example) a single instant of getting it. Like when my nephew was born: the 48 hours of labor preceeding the actual birth were excellent birth control, but as soon as his big punkin head popped out, I thought, "Ohhhh. So this is why people have kids." I got it.

It was pointed out to me by various people over the course of last quarter that "aha! moment" might be well, a little hokey. After all, Oprah uses it. And do I really want my readers to be thinking about Oprah? So I've been going back and forth on this issue for several months now. In the thesis draft I just turned in last week, I omitted all references to "aha!" and replaced it instead with the somewhat more loquacious "experience of being pulled into the here-and-now."

My advisor just emailed me yesterday with the breaking news that the front page of the online edition of the New York Times (and the paper version of today's paper!) features an article by chief art critic Michael Kimmelman. Kimmelman was pretty much the reason I went to graduate school–he writes about art reflectively, contemplatively, and in a way that is readable, accessible, and even exciting. He anticipates his readers' doubts and skepticisms and persuades them to give art a chance. Even the difficult kind of art, the earthworks and Yoko Ono performances and Bob Ross and his "happy little clouds." His book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (which you should immediately go out and purchase) has been the model for the kind of writing I'm trying to do.

So of course I went straight to the article. (I've copied it here since the New York Times doesn't archive their articles for more than a week.) Either Kimmelman doesn't watch Oprah or he doesn't care, because he draws on V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist who is interested in the relationship between neurology and the visual arts. Ramachandran describes–you guessed it–an "aha! moment" when the brain processes, say, seemingly disorganized splotches that become a Dalmation upon closer examination.

Ramachandran even goes so far as to compare the experience of understanding art to an orgasm: "[art] may be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax." He describes the climax as the culmination of the multiple "ahas!" that one undergoes when they try to discern that Dalmation. He says that our brains seem to tend toward things like grouping together like colors or assembling parts as a whole.

It would seem, then, that Ramachandran is working from the premise that art is beautiful. But I think that premise was thrown out the window a long time ago, certainly at least by the time Cubism and Futurism were entering the art world's consciousness. Beauty wasn't the point. Subverting beauty was (at least, it was a point). Good art doesn't have to be beautiful; sometimes it's provocative or frightening or just plain challenging. And why shouldn't Yoko Ono or earthworks provide an "aha! moment"?

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current book: Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, vol. 1. That's not gonna change for awhile.
current music: Amelie soundtrack
current socks: white socks with red toes and heels and "Texas" written on the side. There's a Texas flag on the top of the sock, and when you fold it down, it says "The Lone Star State."

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I almost made the title of this post "On Writing," but then I went back and revised it. I've always had a perverse enjoyment of revision, but I've learned this past quarter to be a lot more rigorous about it. One of the most useful things I got out of my writing workshop was practice at figuring out exactly what makes good writing good and bad writing bad. It's tricky. Is it the grammar? The sentence structure? The parallelism (or, in my case, the lack thereof)? Blogging is proving to be an exercise in speed-revision, because I am now much more attuned to my grammatical and structural tendencies (good and bad), and I am constantly editing myself. Not a bad thing, considering that part of my reason for starting this blog was to work out ideas and get myself writing something on a regular basis.

I'm still trying to work out how to end two of the essays in my thesis. I feel like I need to make some conclusions about the nature of original art and mass-reproductions, but I'm being pulled in different directions as to whether I should foreground my argument or my narrative structure. Ideally, my narrative structure would be so sparkling and seamless that it would contain an implicit argument. But this writing business is a helluva lot harder than it looks. I'm not sure how writers of longer works can keep it all together; the revisions I'm dealing with are mind-boggling, and that's just for a measly 30 page paper. One of my peers here said she wanted to see how many drafts, say, David Sedaris goes through on an average essay. She hoped it was at least twenty.

I've now made at least three four revisions to this post. And it's a blog post, for fuck's sake.

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current book: Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, vol. 1
current music: "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" by The Magnetic Fields. How do you not love a song with lyrics like, "love or not / i've always got ten guys on whom i can depend / but if you're not mine / one less is nine / get wise / i thought you were my boyfriend" ?
current socks: black with two large carrots on each one, and a rabbit atop each carrot. happy almost easter!

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1. a girl in one of your classes takes notes in mirror image, a la Leonardo da Vinci.
2. the graffiti in the women’s locker room is in latin.
3. at least once a day, you run into somebody who is reading while walking.
4. friendster/myspace profiles include interests like “theories of embodiment.”
5. the words “conflate” and “meta”-anything are used in everyday conversation. with confidence.
6. your advisor footnotes his emails to you.

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These make me want to kick off my Sauconys and run around Chicago unshod.

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Monte protests all the work I've been doing on my thesis

I just turned in draft #483 of my MA thesis on Sunday. I'm thinking of it as the rough rough draft, the draft that precurses the official rough draft that's due in another three weeks. I'm thinking of it that way because it does not feel complete. I still have plenty of work ahead of me. Like trying to properly end those two essays that just sort of drop off. Ooops.

My thesis is a series of creative nonfiction essays about my experiences with art; two essays are about street murals in Chicago and one is about the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit I worked on in my days at the Eiteljorg Museum. I'm interested in what inhabits the space between artwork and observer, why some art makes us wild with joy or crazy with anger or struck by sadness. Is it the art itself? The observer? I'm not so much interested in exploring theories that answer those questions as I am with telling the stories of how I came to those questions. Hopefully that's a more interesting thesis, too, something that's exciting and readable.

It begins in the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where I lived and studied my junior year of college. While we waited for the Print Room supervisor to bring us the first drawings, my tutor, Juliana asked if I had ever seen 16^th century art up close. I hadn’t, but Juliana had been guiding me through slides and books for several weeks, so I was eager to finally see the real thing. The supervisor brought out the first heavy, linen box. She ceremoniously pulled on her white cotton gloves and lifted the cover. Juliana thanked her as she set the first drawing in front of us; the supervisor merely responded with the warning that we should let her know when we were ready for the next drawing. Only she could touch them.

Juliana turned reverently quiet while I took everything in. The protective supervisor disappeared; I was only vaguely aware of Juliana still seated next to me. I was completely immersed in the aged, gray paper sitting on the ledge in front of us. I was looking at the crucifixion of Christ.

He was alive, but barely. Only a small piece of cloth draped Christ’s body, clinging to his thighs. His eyes rolled upwards as he pleaded to be released into eternity, and I could imagine his soul poised to leave its corporeal sheath. His right hand was open; his left, clenched. His body was contorted: his torso jutted away from his legs, which pressed together in pain, and he stretched his toes apart, tightening and releasing. On either side of him, an angel clutched his face in sorrow, mourning Christ’s imminent death. A single skull rested at the bottom of the cross, partially submerged in the ground. Many others had died here.

I struggled to pull myself back into the Print Room. I began to look at this drawing with the art historian’s eye that Juliana had worked to develop in me. Christ’s body was clear and polished, but the pencil was softly drawn and smudged, giving the drawing lines that were focused enough to dramatize the pain of the Crucifixion’s final excruciating moments, but soft enough to prevent this from merely being a study of the physical form. There were no unresolved pentimenti, the changes an artist makes as he works, and that are frequently visible in drawings like the one before me. This drawing was decisive. The extraordinary emphasis on both body and soul was executed by an artist who knew every muscle and every nerve. It was executed by an artist who knew where the soul pulsed and where the spirit breathed. Following Christ’s gaze upwards, I could almost hear the angels’ cry. The spiritual longing was palpable, vast, and unrequited. I needed no faith to feel this. I didn’t have to look at the label on the linen box to identify what I was looking at. In front of me was a Michelangelo.

It was that moment of being pulled into the here-and-now of a work of art that made me want to be involved with art all the time, every day. It was that moment that ultimately inspired me to schlep out to Pilsen on cold winter days to look at street murals and try to figure out if other kinds of art can unleash that magical power. I think they can.

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