Farewell to the Groves of Academe
Thanks to all of you who signed on last week in response to my tiny social media campaign. Please keep spreading the word (this post has a share button), so that maybe I can get the numbers up enough to keep my East Coast agent interested.
Readers sometimes ask me how it is that I can remember so much from decades ago. I am not sure what the trip wire is—what works in the clichéd manner of Proust’s madeleine—but it might be as simple as a line recalled (how can you forget when your mother asks your boyfriend if he’d like a “roll across the table”?) or it might be an especially well-worn and treasured object. Take the sofa bed from my first grown-up apartment on West 104th Street in Manhattan. In my gypsy grad-school days it traveled with me from West 111th to West 107th to 340 Riverside Drive to my first apartment with Mr. Landi, and then, as newlyweds, it accompanied us to Vermont, only to get lost in the landfill of time (sort of like the marriage).
It was on that couch that I was taking a nap prior to Jimmy Carter’s election on November 2, 1976, when an intruder attempted to enter through the fire escape into my living room. I scared him off with a shriek. It was the third break-in since I took up residence (the landlord never cared enough to put decent locks on the windows), and it seemed the signal that it was time to move.
Too bad, because I loved that place. It was across the street from a Catholic church, where one of the faithful elderly female parishioners stopped daily to have a chat with a statue of the Virgin Mary. It had an eat-in kitchen, a luxury in Manhattan, even if the cabinets were wonky and the floor was scuffed linoleum. And it had a sleeping ell, with a double bed on a raised platform, so that activities thereon felt, well, rather holy. Mr. Landi and I enjoyed many Saturday nights in that apartment, fooling around and then watching Saturday Night Live, which had debuted about a year earlier.
But three break-ins, resulting in the theft of my Royal portable typewriter and a small black-and-white TV, were a bit much. And so when one of my friends vacated a shared apartment at 340 Riverside Drive, on the corner of 106th Street, the sofa bed and I joined the two remaining roommates. Gerri, a grad student in the history department, and Sally, who was finishing her thesis on Jacobean tragedies, despised each other for reasons I could never quite fathom, and the atmosphere was often tense. If Sally went away for the weekend, she took the cords to her stereo, so Gerri could not use it. I tended to side with Sal if there were disputes because she and Mr. Landi had immediately formed a mutual admiration society. Whenever he called the apartment, if Sally answered, she would sing out, “Oh, Ann, it’s Sweetheart for you!”
I was by then in the second semester of my second year of graduate studies, and it was time to figure out a subject for a master’s essay. Somehow, I had run across a series of Rodin drawings—in the fine arts library of the main branch of the NYPL—that were labeled the “Black Drawings” (and now I can’t find any real mention of these online). I was intrigued and excited because I they were not mentioned anywhere in the literature on Rodin, and I hoped perhaps that I could work with Kirk Varnedoe on a thesis. But Varnedoe, as it turned out, was about to go on leave, and I dropped the idea for want of any background on the works.
And so for reasons that still confound me to this day I decided to write about David Smith’s sculpture from the 1940s. Smith is best known for the monumental burnished steel works of later decades and was lauded by powerhouse critic Clement Greenberg in the ‘60s as “the greatest sculptor the country has ever produced.” But I decided to focus on earlier works, most of which are, by comparison with his masterpieces, ditzy and busy jumbles of quasi-figurative elements. But I made the case—rather brilliant, thought I—that because Smith was reading a lot of James Joyce at the time, the sculptures were a visual equivalent to Joyce’s “portmanteau” words—that is, words smashed together or fabricated from nonsensical scraps to make entirely new words (such as “ringroundabout” and “poppysmic” from Ulysses). My adviser gave me an A (okay, it was the assistant lecturer I’d been sleeping with on and off before I met Mr. Landi, but I’d dumped him in a friendly way months earlier), and I promptly sent it off to one of the art magazines. Of course, I never heard back, and it would be a long time before I realized how absurd it was to send a student paper stuffed with footnotes to a mainstream art journal.
Meanwhile I was rapidly heading toward a crise de foi about the pursuit of a PhD, which was the next step in the academic steeplechase. All around me friends were questioning the wisdom of more time dedicated to professions in which job opportunities seemed limited at best. Gerri quit the history department and apprenticed herself to a literary agent. Another in my circle looked up from reading Beowulf in Old English and wondered WTF he was doing when other opportunities beckoned (he eventually joined the foreign service). One of my moments of truth came when I stumbled into the “smoking room” of the art library and saw a clutch of students, wreathed in an ashen haze, cramming for orals. And how many more years would it take to earn a doctorate? I was terrified I might end up like the slide librarian, a perpetual student, a chunky fortyish woman in pilled sweaters and Birkenstocks, forever haunting the lecture halls and still taking notes.
But perhaps the biggest stumbling block of all to an academic career—and I assumed that was the only kind one could have with a PhD—was chronic shyness. This forthright young woman who could be so bold around men was terrified to stand in front of even a small group of students and give a seminar report. I had to pop one of my mother’s Valium to deliver a paper on François Rude, author of La Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe (top) and the poignant tomb sculpture of Godefroi Cavaignac (the subject of my report). I was too shy to ask a waitress for ketchup in a restaurant or phone a movie theater to ask for screening times (in the days before recorded announcements). How the hell was I ever going to stand in front of a sea of faces and deliver a lecture? I got over it in time, largely when I had to do real reporting in my early 30s, but diffidence remained a problem in my early adult years. I used to joke that I married my ex in part because he had the courage to call Chinese restaurants and order dinner.
It had also been dawning on me that art history, circa 1977, was still very much a boys’ game. The entire tenured graduate faculty, with the exception of the elderly Edith Porada, was white, male and fiftyish. Although I was neck and neck in terms of grades with a male student in my year, it was he whom Varnedoe chose as a research assistant. And that same student eased up the ladder at MoMA not long after, mentored by a powerful male curator. It’s just the way the system worked back then, and I hadn’t the courage to storm the barricades.
And so I quietly dropped out of the program, sending a letter to the chairman, a scholar of Renaissance sculpture whom I would interview years later for a story in ARTnews. He never wrote back.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” asked the poet Mary Oliver in “The Summer Day.” At that point in time, I hadn’t a fucking clue.
The Perfect Baked Potato
When I was not eating with Mr. Landi or one of my friends, my favorite solo dinner in graduate school (and sometimes even now) was a baked potato and half a package of Stouffer’s creamed spinach (which I can no longer find in my local markets, so now I opt for spinach soufflé). I have tried many ways of baking potatoes, from an English slow-and-low formula (bake at 325 for about two hours) to microwaving (which always turns out gummy, in my experience) to baking in foil (essentially, you are “steaming,” not baking, the spud, and you won’t get a crispy skin). This is the method that works for me:
Choose a one-pound russet potato. Scrub and dry it and poke it several times with a fork. Rub it all over with a teaspoon olive oil and sprinkle generously with coarse kosher salt and a little garlic powder. Bake at 425 degrees for 55-60 minutes, preferably on a mesh rack on top of a small baking sheet, testing for doneness with a sharp paring knife. Remove using tongs or a hot pad, split the jacket, top with whatever floats your boat: butter, sour cream, parsley. Fantastico!
That potato sounds like a great meal ! Plan to have it tomorrow. I love reading your "memoirs."
Thank you Ann! Great reading you always!!!