Presumably, in order to fit the immense metal Mothership into the newly built museum structure, the curators will have to tear the roof off the sucker.

Ahahahahahahaha, it’s a Hopper. Get it?

But now it’s even harder. Since my back injury, I’ve put on weight, which takes me from the top end of the misses’ sizes into the hinterlands of plus size. I dread this, in part because manufacturers often cut 16+ sizes for buxom figures, not strapping figures. On me, the sleeves are too short, the shoulders and back cling, and the boobs and waist gape.

I also dread it because so many plus-size dress styles suggest that we should cover our shame: billowing feet of cheap fabric, high necks, ballooning sleeves, ankle-length hems. So what if I’ve gone up a size? I still don’t want to dress like Sergeant Sarah Brown going to the opera.

Let me be clear: I do not dread the plus sizes because the size range indicates that I’m “fat.” I got over that worry some time ago.*

self-love

For many years, I managed a boutique. Every day, I saw women — all kinds of women: slim and willowy, tall and powerful, gracefully statuesque, plump and lovely, reed-thin, muscular and athletic — come in, try on outfits, and look critically at themselves in the mirror. It was rarely easy for them, and often agonizing.

I saw beautiful women of all shapes and sizes insult themselves in the most vicious language. A woman with a luscious round bosom talked about “these monsters” that ruined the line of a too-tight bodice. A strapping athlete bemoaned her powerful thighs and biceps, which refused to be ignored in a fitted sheath. Slim women complained that they didn’t fill out billowy dresses, and curvaceously plump women moaned that they were “too fat” for evening wear.

I saw women cry when they needed to move up (or down) a dress size. I saw women dance when something fit off the rack.

We had a roster of regular customers, and I got to know their styles and favorite colors, their shopping patterns, and — most crucially — their emotional triggers.

One rule I lived by: the fault is always with the garment, not with the woman. If the skirt clings unkindly to your bum, if the blouse pops at the button, if the dress tugs and pulls, it’s the skirt, the blouse, or the dress that’s the wrong shape. The customer is the right shape. This appeared to be a revolutionary idea to many of our customers.

In all those years, there was only one woman who routinely stepped out of the dressing room, looked at her reflection, and said “Wow! I look gorgeous!“

That woman was me. Yes, I called myself gorgeous. More than that, I did it routinely.

I’d seen too many beautiful women insult themselves, despise themselves for imagined failings, and utterly fail to see their own beauty. I swore to help them see it, and to keep myself safe from similar blindness.

I know that the whole notion of physical beauty is fraught with pitfalls. Physical beauty ought not to be a prerequisite for self-esteem, nor for eliciting esteem from others. Physical beauty ought to be is optional for women, as it is for men.

But I see my physical beauty. I claim my physical beauty. Just because it often falls outside the narrow norms defined by our culture doesn’t mean it’s invisible.

My determination not to vilify my own body was cemented by my first partner’s illness and death from AIDS, and my father’s decline from emphysema and a constellation of smoking-related maladies. I watched both of them waste away, their bodies increasingly frail and skeletonized, and I fully internalized the truth: your body is a machine to carry you through this world. If it stays reasonably strong and performs daily tasks with little complaint, you are one of the rare lucky people with a perfect body. Enjoy it. Celebrate it.

I don’t know if any of you needed to read this, but I needed to write it. After all my shopping and measuring and criticizing and fretting, I had a lapse of faith. I needed to say all this, to get this out of my head and into text, to make it concrete.

the Woman of Willendorf

It seems appropriate that this reflection roughly coincides with a celebration of the Woman of Willendorf, the profoundly rounded figurine you see above. It She was discovered in August of 1908: it’s her 100th anniversary, though of course her private history began perhaps 25,000 years ago.

In 1908, she was dubbed “the Venus of Willendorf,” a winking misnomer that seduces the viewer into making comparisons between the Willendorf figure and the classical Venus of antiquity and the Renaissance. The classical Venus was both erotic and demure, making a (necessarily failed) attempt to cover herself, thus perfectly displaying her attributes to the male gaze.

By contrast, the Woman of Willendorf gloriously displays her sexual characteristics: lavish breasts, belly, and buttocks swell to meet the hand and eye. More than that, her prominent navel and labia proclaim that it is not mere erotic beauty on display here, but fertility. She is not a sex object; she is female sexuality itself.

Her very fatness is a fantasy. Consider how unlikely a figure she would be in her presumed culture of origin: in our current understanding of gatherer-hunter subsistence modes, such lushness of frame would be a practical impossibility for most women. Her lavish rolls and swells suggest ample resources at her disposal, prominent among them food and leisure.

the truth

Though I conjecture that she is an object of fantasy, and perhaps a fertility symbol, the art historian in me admits the simple truth. We know little about the Willendorf figurine: her origin, her cultural purpose, her maker.
I do know she’s lovely. Those curves, the oval form punctuated with carved swells and valleys, the sense of luscious mass packed into that small shape — it all makes my hands ache to hold her, to feel the grainy texture of her shape in my cupped palm.

She’s beautiful.

I am beautiful.

And so are you. Yes, you.

If you can’t see it, look closer.

*Update, Mon, Sept 1st:

I must admit, evidently I’m not entirely over it, given how I sobbed in fury and embarrassment after yet another failed attempt to order one pretty dress, any pretty dress. But at least I dig in my heels and resist the conventionally approved feelings of inadequacy and shame.

Yeah, sometimes I’m fat. There are moment when that feels awful, like a moral indictment, not a mere statement of fat fact. But, because I claim my right to be beautiful outside that narrow margin, there are days when I’m fat and I rock it, baby.

Image courtesy of Matthias Kabel under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The walls are decorated, yes, but several years ago I looked around and realized that all of the pieces hanging in my living room, bedroom, kitchen — everywhere — were recontextualized items — sheet music illustrations, vintage cards mounted and framed, wooden or enameled tin signs, framed vintage anthropological paperbacks with lurid covers featuring scantily clad native maidens, early advertising images, reproductions and miniatures of movie posters — that I’d chosen to treat as art.

Right now, we have all those and more (including two vintage baseball-inspired board games from my father’s childhood, wrapped in plastic and propped up over the bar), and one honest-to-goodness painting hanging in the bedroom nook.

About that painting: it’s a smudgy little oil painting slapped onto a thin, mass-produced canvas board, a smudgy little Punch & Judy scene slapped onto a thin, mass-produced canvas board sixty years ago by my grandparents’s artist friend, Nunzio. I always liked it, and remarked as much to my father one day. The next time I visited, he showed it to me, ready to be boxed up, a Post-it tag with my name stuck to its back.

Friends sometimes remark on the oddness of an art history student whose home houses little or no art. But art is a slippery little notion, and I don’t pretend to know where its borders are. I don’t think anyone knows, and I’m wary of those who make pretense of it.

So I’m suspicious and resentful of the premise of ABC tv’s quiz Art or Not Art?, which sees clear boundaries where none exist. A little less arbitrary is An Artist or An Ape?, though even there a boundary is unnecessarily drawn. Who’s to say it’s “artist or ape,” not “artist and ape”?

I am participating in NaBloPoMo.

“Yeah! He’s a dentist!”

This caught Dad’s attention, and he looked down at the packet, a smile crinkling his face. “Ah, no, no he’s actually An Actor,” giving the last two words a storybook emphasis. Dad’s eye flickered toward me and he gave me the special “ain’t kids crazy?” raised eyebrow.

It was time to chip in. “Actually, he’s right, in a way… The model for the original painting was Grant Wood’s dentist.”

The father turned wide eyes on his son, and a new look dawned on his face. “Hey… how did you know that?” he breathed softly.

The kid shrugged. “I dunno. I know things.”

Yeah.

I am participating in NaBloPoMo.

I can think of one friend who knows a hawk from a handsaw, and very likely can tell a doll from an action figure. Another friend would ponder, weak and weary, over this, or possibly bury it under the floorboards.

The only action figure I have ever owned was given me by a fellow geek in the early stages of courting, and an astonishingly successful gesture it was. That Elsa had twelve points of articulation, her own electrode, and a fully replaceable head, just like me! (A few years later, the same geek swiped my Bride while I was packing my things. Ah, love.)

But even my lost Elsa pales when I gaze upon the wonder, the horror, that is Hieronymus Bosch action figures. My hands actually clench and grasp at the empty air, so potent is my desire to possess them.

- spent an hour on a trampoline with L (age 8 ) and
G (age 5), during which time they performed the dance routine from Love Is A Battlefield.
- spent an afternoon and evening with young persons (see above) crawling on my person.
- was taken as a guest to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and also treated to lunch, and other sundry smaller treats, all because it was “Elsa’s birthday in Boston,” as in “No, you have to take the front seat —- it’s your birthday in Boston!” [See disclaimer.]
- learned that the Boston MFA freaking rocks.
- walked all unawares into a museum gallery only to discover that it housed the actual medieval Spanish chapel whose challenging and innovative transfer and installation I studied at some length last year.
- was regaled with (largely undeserved) accolades of my professional glory and graciousness by my
former boss and co-worker.
- got drunk, just once and only for about 25 minutes, but in the company of two beloved academics and their adorable 21-year-old research assistant, who just got cuter the more I drank.
- was offered one hypothetical job.
- got the shortest haircut my barber would allow.
- consumed one raspberry gelato topped with fresh raspberries.
- came home to a message from my sister asking if she could please bring me a birthday cake.

It’s been a pretty good week.

Disclaimer: it was certainly not my birthday, except in Boston, or so reasoned my companions, who are evidently more in tune with eddies of irregularity within the space/time continuum than I am.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and Elli’s falls two weeks from now. I suggest we spend two weeks in merriment: bring on the gelato, trampolines, cake, and haircuts, not to mention the occasional vodka & tonic.
Let us commence rejoicing.

I’d love to maintain a “current reading” sidebar myself, truly I would, but with the quantities of texts I’m reading for classes and research, it simply isn’t feasible to be entering and linking them here. No, really.

No, really.

But I wanted to post a few, if only once. Here is a partial list of the texts I plan to read, scan, or skim over the next five days for two research projects. The list is partial in that I have only listed the books I have in hand at the time of this entry, not the texts I will pick up tomorrow from interlibrary loan or the exciting foray into the periodical stacks, where I will be claiming such beauties as The Journal of Radical Political Economics. Of course, this excludes my basic readings for classes, and we should all keep in mind that I have barely started reading for my third research topic.

Ha! I’m kidding! We don’t all need to keep that in mind! Just me.

my weekend reading:

Barnes, D.R. Matters of taste: Food and drink in seventeenth-century Dutch art and life.
Bauer, D.G. The “how to”grants manual: Successful grantseeking techniques for obtaining public and private grants.
Belcher, M. Exhibitions in museums.
Brown, C. Images of a golden past: Dutch genre painting of the seventeenth century.
Cantwell, A., and D. diZerega Wall. Unearthing Gotham: The archaeology of New York.
Carmel, J.H. Exhibition techniques, traveling and temporary.
Chepp, M. Low-life in the lowlands: Seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish genre painting.
Fisher, S. W. English ceramics; earthenware, Delft, stoneware, cream-ware, porcelain, including a section on Welsh factories.
Fleming, D., C. Paine, and J.G. Rhodes. Social history in museums: a handbook for professionals.
Franits, W.E. Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting: Its stylistic and thematic evolution.
Franits, W.E. Paragons of virtue: Women and domesticity in seventeenth-century Dutch art.
Golden, S.L. Secrets of successful grantsmanship: a guerrilla guide to raising money.
High, G.R. Getting funded: The art of writing successful proposals.
Hopkins, K.B., and C.S. Friedman. Successful fundraising for arts and cultural organizations.
Lewis, R.H. Manual for museums.
Macdonald, A. L. No idle hands : The social history of American knitting.
Mojzer, M. Dutch genre paintings.
Rose, P.G. The sensible cook: Dutch foodways in the Old and the New World.
Runyard, S., and Y. French. The marketing and public relations handbook for museums, galleries, and heritage attractions.
Safner, I. The weaving Roses of Rhode Island.
Witteborg, L.P. Good show!: A practical guide for temporary exhibitions.

And, the last text I have the heart to list, although not even close to the last text I’ll be reading this week. The title says it all:
To toil the livelong day : America’s women at work, 1780-1980.

I topped out at a paltry 8,000 words, more than half of which I wrote after my decision in early November to quit, since I was then despairing over finishing my theses and projects.

I definitely plan to sign up again next year — it was marvelous for my morale to have one crushingly complex project I could simply jettison. Very cleansing.

Speaking of theses, tonight I turn in Human and holy: The terracotta Madonna reliefs of the della Robbia workshop. I’m very pleased with how it turned out, and I can’t imagine how I would have done it without the snazzy new computer that my mother thoughtfully gave me. How did I ever manage?

I spent a happy few days thinking this was was probably the least popular children’s game ever… until I found in one of my research texts a Renaissance account of a little Florentine girl and her friends, whose adorable form of play was to imagine themselves members of a flagellant confraternity.

They’re so cute when they’re that age.