“Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” by Camille Laurens

I had been meaning to pick this book up for a while, it was recommended reading from the book Don’t Think Dear and I thought it sounded fascinating. This book tries to tell the true story of Degas’ iconic sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” or as I knew it growing up, “Marie in Fourth Position.”

The book covers many aspects of Paris at this time. There’s the treatment of young dancers like Marie, who came from impoverished families trying to sell their daughters to the Paris Opera to make more money. There’s what we know about Marie’s family, she’s the middle daughter of a family where the father is missing. She moved around a lot, likely rent hopping.

Then there’s Degas. His eyesight is going so he is moving from painting to sculpture with specifically wax. He is the odd one out of the Impressionists since he prefers dark scenes and horrifying reality instead of pretty pictures. When this sculpture is unveiled, it shocks and horrifies the public. This was the heyday of phrenology and thinking that personalities, and criminal tendencies especially, were written on a person’s face. The little dancer happens to have exaggerated criminal characteristics, and may not even reflect what the model looked like very well. It isn’t totally clear what Degas intended with this work, he has other sketches of criminals where he exaggerates their features so he may buy into this nonsense, but he also displayed the sculpture like a doll and emphasized her age in its name. He’s calling attention to the fact that she’s a child, barely hit puberty, and she’s in an environment where she’s likely being driven to prostitution to make money.

The book ends with Laurens trying desperately to know what became of Marie. We have her birth date, and the death dates of both her sisters and mother, but we have no idea what became of her. After modeling for Degas and other painters, she misses so many days at the Paris Opera that she’s fired as a dancer. That same month her older sister steals money and they’re caught as the family tries to get away. The older sister spends time in jail after that. And Marie disappears.

Since there is just so little we know about Marie, the book is full of speculation and rumination on the sculpture more so than her life. There’ll be a discussion of some aspect of Paris society or whatever, and then we’ll be back to how that is reflected in the sculpture. Some of it does appear to be grasping at straws, I’m not entirely convinced that Degas wanted this little dancer to reflect all of life and death in her face. But I’m not ungrateful for the thoughts, I think art like this can be molded and remolded to reflect whatever the audience is thinking about.

And I am grateful for Laurens’ tenacity to stick to the facts. There’s a lot of fictionalized accounts of this work. She stubbornly refused to do that, even documenting how hard she was trying to find out information about Marie. The extent of the speculation is pretty clear, she asks questions throughout or talk about what she imagines the interactions between Degas and Marie to be. I wish we knew more about her life as well.

It is so interesting to me how the reception to this work of art has changed. It horrified the people of Paris when it was unveiled, and now every dancer knows it and loves it. This was a fascinating perspective on the work, and a much needed reality check for what it was intended and who it is portraying.

This Is Beautiful: Kind of a Break?

 Last week my mentor was out of town, and this week a lot of activities I do are suspended for a break before the fall. It's nice to get a break from the pressure, and it's nice that it's not all at once, so I get multiple chill weeks. In different ways of course, but still. When my mentor was out I was able to course prep and get stuff done that I wanted to do personally, and then with less activities I have more evenings free during the first week of class. It's nice! I almost prefer it to a complete stop to be honest, still feels like I'm going but it's a little more relaxed.

“Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens

I’m not sure how this book got onto my radar, but it’s another one that has been on my reading list for a while, so I decided to bring it with me on vacation. Pretty light stuff for the beach. Anyways, it consists of seven essays that Hitchens wrote and published in Vanity Fair, then it was collected into a book after he died. I didn’t really know the author’s work all that well, but I thought this was a great collection of thoughts on dying.

Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and writes a lot about his treatment and his feelings as he goes through this, but he also talks about how people treat him. From what I gather he was very outspoken about the failures of religion and he writes about what it’s like for people to pray for him as an atheist and just how weird that is. He also writes about how his voice started to disappear as a result of the treatment and how unfortunate that was for him as a communicator. There was a section where he talks about how he doesn’t “have” a body, he “is” a body and how easy it is to forget that when you’re healthy.

To be honest, I thought this was a very refreshing take on death. I’ve read so much stuff about death from the point of view of a physician and whatnot that I appreciated getting the perspective from a patient. Particularly a patient who clearly knows his craft and is good at writing. It makes for a much more relatable experience for me as a reader who is not a physician, plus I just feel that the market is saturated with doctors trying to share their thoughts about the whole death thing. So it was a quick read, kinda depressing, but I quite enjoyed it.

This Is Beautiful: Independent Course Design

 I got moved to a different course recently and it was a swap from teaching with someone else to teaching on my own again. And even though it's more work, I am excited to be just on my own and having that flexibility again. Last fall I was in a similar situation and I liked the freedom, and now I have the added benefit of building off of a previous instructor's materials. (Thankfully it's not like last fall where I was doing a course from scratch.) I think it'll be a good semester as a result!

“Networking for People Who Hate Networking” by Devora Zack

This book had been on my list for a while, and in theory I need to be looking for a job soon, so seemed like a good time to bring it on vacation with me. It was a quick but kinda entertaining read.

I think I was surprised a little by the fact that the whole premise of the book is that you can tailor your networking strategies to whether you feel more like an introvert or an extrovert (yes there are centroverts as well). There is a lot of emphasis on how these groups of people can learn from each other, and you might not fit into one category seamlessly. But it’s a framework to guide how you think about networking and approach it instead of being scared of it. Zack sprinkles in plenty of anecdotes about people she has worked with or mistakes she’s made. Overall she advocates for being prepared and to devote just a little time to networking instead of burning yourself out on it.

I think this was helpful to read, but I wasn’t particularly surprised by any of it. The main benefit was that it was all wrapped up in snappy ways to remember her strategies. I also feel like as a scientist we definitely network but it’s a little different in that I don’t know anyone with a business card or anything like that. So there are limits to what I can do with this as well, but I think a lot of the big ideas can easily be applied.

Anyways, glad I finally gave it a read, if it wasn’t the most helpful it was short so I didn’t have to invest a ton of time into it.

This Is Beautiful: Circus Performing

 I recently found out that the aerials studio I've been going to for a while lets even folks from the intro classes perform! As I'm staring down my last year of graduate school I'm about to lose my dance group that I've been with, and it'd be nice to have a different venue to perform with. At least I'd still get to perform if it isn't working with others so much. And I really appreciate that intro students can since I've been stuck there due to lack of upper body strength and the fact that I build up muscle so slowly.

Anyways, excited to check that out soon! Hopefully this will work out as a new thing I can do as a creative outlet.

“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi

This book has been on my reading list long enough that I started it and was surprised at my choice. The plot gets turned on its head though halfway through, and again just before the end. Then I realized why I was so interested in it.

The book starts with a story about teenagers Sarah and David who are both in the theatre program at a performing arts high school. They start off in love but then drift apart. Sarah can’t figure out why and is constantly orbiting David trying to get his attention again. They end up hosting a theatre troupe from England as well, and Sarah starts a thing with their unattractive star Liam.

The narrative abruptly stops at page 131, which is revealed to be as far into a book that “Karen” gets. “Karen” is the pseudonym for a classmate of Sarah’s, who is now an adult and reading Sarah’s fictionalized version of their high school experience. She stops at that point as it becomes clear that she isn’t going to be fully portrayed in the story. Karen keeps the use of the pseudonyms to be consistent, but she talks about how she swapped to dance and left town, but then ended up coming back and befriending David in the process. David is also in their hometown and directing theatre there, he wants to put on a play written by Martin, the director of the English troupe that was in town when they were students. Karen was implied to be in a relationship with Martin, and she manages to get cast in the play. She also goes to meet Sarah on her book tour and convinces Sarah to be her backstage dresser for the show. Having done all this, she was supposed to shoot a blank out of a gun backstage with Martin so that there’d be a gunshot for the play. Opening night though, she shoots him in the crotch. Her narration reveals that he got her pregnant before leaving town and she gave up the baby for adoption.

The final chapter is from the point of view of her daughter. Real names are now used so it’s hard to be sure who anyone is at first. But she goes to the school to try and figure out who her mother was. She talks to their teacher, and the chapter opens with her attending a memorial for his life. In a flashback she talks about how she went to his house to try and get information from him and he sexually assaulted her. She never figures out her mother’s name.

The twist halfway through was by far the most interesting part of the book, because it allows the focus to go from these teenagers to the unreliable narrator that we’ve been hearing from this whole time. There’s such a long amount of time dedicated to Sarah and David in the beginning, you really have to slog through all of that before it gets interesting. Many of the details are woven into there, such as the characters that Karen gets chopped into, but the author really makes you work here. Post changeover, with the change in focus to Karen it really sets things on their head. You start off rooting for Sarah, but Karen has very little patience for Sarah the author. She’s even downright unkind at times. But you start to piece together what’s been changed and what’s been even deliberately left out.

I found the ending also really striking. You never figure out Karen’s real name as she just goes by “Karen” and her daughter never gets that information from her failed trip to the school. It says a lot about sexual assault cases, especially with teens, that the victim is never named but the villain has articles and papers written about him as he gets accused. Not to mention that the two main father figures both turn out to be sexually assaulting students. There aren’t any major female adults, just those two male ones, so definitely a pattern going on there. It speaks to the power that adults have other these teens that are trying to prove themselves as artists and as individuals. And that the power is so long lasting that it transcends generations with it impacting Karen’s daughter as well.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think I even had a better experience going in a little blind. I really had to commit to that first section and then got so excited when it got interesting. My favorite kind of books are the ones that make you think about the medium, so I’m really glad I found this one.

This Is Beautiful: Things Starting

 I'm such a sucker, I love doing nothing and the free time that I have over the summer, but I'm also getting excited about being back from vacation and things starting up for the fall. I just feel like I need something to look forward to, you know? The dance group I'm with is announcing pieces to sign up for and I'll be teaching a low-key lab class. It'll be good to be in a classroom again. I'm just hoping that the academic year has a good balance of time to work on my things (or I'm never graduating) and fun stuff to do.

Madeira

So for two weeks in July I was on vacation and we spent a lot of time in Madeira, a small Portuguese island. It was really lovely! We were close to the city of Funchal without being directly in the middle of it and there was a great mix of nature and city. We tried to see Lisbon as well but between flight delays and things being closed on Mondays, there wasn’t much I saw or did. So I’ll have to head back there to check it out properly, but I feel like I can definitely talk about Madeira!

We got there and immediately I was struck by the beautiful flowers and insects. The area is tropical so I think pretty much everything grows and likes being there. It’s gorgeous! There are also banana trees everywhere, plus grapes for their wine and passionfruit and things like that. We figured out that there were so many monarch butterflies because there’s a population of monarchs that were blown there accidentally and just never left the island. So they have a slightly different wing shape since they don’t have to fly as high to migrate and everything. Also eating the fruit is amazing, there’s passionfruit in most things but everything is good.

We did a few hikes on the island, it’s pretty mountainous and really only half of the island gets rain. So they have a system of levants that are these canals to bring water to agriculture. And that creates these pretty level walking paths. People clearly use them, we ran into folks bringing groceries home while hiking which was pretty funny. And the views were incredible, I felt like we covered so much ground so quickly and got to see mountains from a few different angles and things like that.

We also spent a few days wandering around, there was one afternoon we went to a beach in town. It was essentially a very big pool, and there wasn’t any sand or rocks or anything, but you could also jump into the ocean. There were a couple floating platforms and rocks to jump off of, but no way to walk into the water. It was still really nice, but after a bit we wanted to be able to stand in the water haha. Still, it’s been forever since I’ve been in the ocean and that was lovely.

There was also one day we spent in town, we checked out the cathedral a little and the Museum of Sacred Art. The museum had more history of the island and how it was used for sugar cane production with the help of slavery until it was outcompeted, and that there was a lot of Flemish trade that brought in more art. Some of the objects in there were still used by the cathedral which was really neat as well. There are a few other museums but they were closed unfortunately. We did get to a food market to try some bananas and see the attached fish market as well, which was so cool! And we stopped at a wine place for a quick tasting on the way back.

Speaking of food, I already mentioned the fruit but the seafood was also very good as well! I really enjoyed the espetada I had, or beef skewer. It was super tender, very tasty. The scabbard fish with a fried banana and passionfruit sauce (of course, you need the passionfruit) was also amazing. I could have also had their grilled limpets all day, it reminded me of mussels but loaded with butter haha. The drinks were also so fun, I loved my nikita since it’s like an alcoholic milkshake and could not find it in enough places. And finally the Portugese custard tarts, pastel de natas, were my favorite snack, I could have eaten those all day. We also tried the Madeira honey cakes and queijadas (more like a cheesecake tart) but the custard tarts are still my favorite.

I do feel like we had a very good and just well-rounded experience of the island, but I would be so ready to go back for another vacation. It was beautiful and quiet and I could hang out on a beach with a nikita all day! Well worth the trip!