The Cooks, the Turkey, and the Formidable Formalist Critic
annlandi.substack.com
I published this post on Vasari21 almost five years ago, and it still seems to me appropriate to the season. Not a romance, precisely, and in no way rotten, but a love letter to a woman friend who meant much to me decades ago. For part of my junior year in college I lived off campus with one of my best friends, Kate, a woman thirteen years older than myself, and in many ways a kind of big sister to me (since I had none). Kate was a late bloomer, a graduate student in the English department, whose big passions were for Shakespeare and John Donne. She was an oddity, both in the department and at Princeton, for being older than the other students and a far different kind of acolyte than was the norm in the staid male-dominated ranks of aspiring English professors. A generously endowed woman with a megawatt smile and a bawdy sense of humor, Kate often drew stares and occasionally comparisons with Sophia Loren, a resemblance that usually annoyed her. Serious students of Shakespeare were not supposed to look like Italian movie stars.
Because of you, I paid more attention to Rosalind Krauss (who is now 80), and found this most excellent article on her in The New Criterion (written in 1993) by Roger Kimball:
"It is easy to be exasperated with Rosalind Krauss. She is pretentious, obscurantist, and mean-spirited. Enjoying a position of great academic respect, she has, through her writings, teaching, and editorship of October, exercised a large and baneful influence on contemporary writing and thinking about culture."
Your experience with her parallels mine in trying to understand what the hell she's saying...impenetrable language like a solid block of graphite. I wish you had confronted her about your grade. With a tape recorder. Probably would take several decades to decipher it!
Nice. Always such a good read, colorful and lively and meaningful.
Always wonderful memories.
Because of you, I paid more attention to Rosalind Krauss (who is now 80), and found this most excellent article on her in The New Criterion (written in 1993) by Roger Kimball:
"It is easy to be exasperated with Rosalind Krauss. She is pretentious, obscurantist, and mean-spirited. Enjoying a position of great academic respect, she has, through her writings, teaching, and editorship of October, exercised a large and baneful influence on contemporary writing and thinking about culture."
Your experience with her parallels mine in trying to understand what the hell she's saying...impenetrable language like a solid block of graphite. I wish you had confronted her about your grade. With a tape recorder. Probably would take several decades to decipher it!
wonderful...one can't always stay in touch but the feelings can remain strong and clear.