at the beginning of this project, i had orginally planned to write my essay on matisse. his paper cut-outs are among my few true loves, but since our time period cut off after world war I, i wouldn’t be able to study those. i considered examining the beginning of his career, but i wasn’t feeling it. old henri’s cute, but frankly, he’s been done. i couldn’t be satisfied with an overkill research paper. in the true fashion of a pretentious princeton student, i wanted to find a subject that could be my own.
—> segue to our fieldtrip to the baltimore museum of art. after the sleepy bus ride, a lovely lunch in the sculpture garden with keerthi (who is, coincidentally, the only other person this term writing on lesbians — check out her site), and a few hours spent wandering the halls of the BMA, i was still pathetically aimless. standing in front of rodin’s the thinker, i was reminded of how much i’d always loved rodin’s sculpture. but loving something wasn’t good enough for me — i love matisse, but i’d bagged him. plus brian had gotten to rodin’s sculpture first. so by the time i wound up in the museum shop trying to calculate how many 80 cent artsy fartsy postcards i could feasibly buy without being ridiculous, i still had no idea what i was doing. the fatal moment came as i was wandering through the book section, admiring all of the exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely overpriced art books. i came to the rodin shelf: sculpture, sculpture, sculpture — wait, images of desire?! i pulled out anne-marie bonnet’s book, and thus was the course of my little life altered. page after page of the most gorgeous drawings of naked women making love to each other — i was sold.
so that’s where this project comes from. i come from a good-sized town in arizona called tucson, which most people pronounce the way it is spelled, tuck-son. the correct way to pronounce it is too-sawn, so keep that in mind the next time you find yourself out in the wild wild west. i grew up on a cattle farm, the daughter of a real-life cowboy and a real-life cowgirl, and my first word was “bronco.” (i am not serious.) i actually grew up in the suburbs, the daughter of an OB/GYN and an english professor, and my first word was “bookie.” this mildly concerned my mother, as she was not sure whether i was going to grow up to be an avid gambler, or an avid reader. whether fortunately or not, i grew up to be the latter. i epitomized “nerd” in elementary school, and very likely still do, although i am much better now at concealing that fact (as many of us are at princeton). as a child, i did not watch tv, i read books. i played chess with my brother and made grass soup in the garbage cans my father used to collect rainwater for his garden. i played pirates and built lego things and swore i’d seen the tooth fairy. when i raised my hand in my freshman english class in high school and asked my teacher what a sitcom was, he told me i was a cultural phenomenon and ought to be experimented on. we’ll see if anyone else ever picks up on it.
for some reason i enjoy thinking of myself as spastic, and for some reason i also enjoy sharing this with people. i commute between the amazingly artsy/homo-friendly/tree-hugging/birkenstock-wearing hippie college town of northampton, MA, where my mother lives, and good old tuck-son, AZ, where my father lives. in northampton i have art parties and bonfires, and in tucson i play with javalinas and hug cacti. javalinas are a species of wild boar, resembling large, narrow pigs with black bristly hair. this is not a joke. my favorite color is brown and my favorite season is the monsoon season in august in arizona. i collect umbrellas, but i was only able to bring 3 of my 16 with me to college. i have two little brothers and a little sister whom i love as i love my own life, and i am particularly partial to airports, pumpkin spice lattés, and uniball pens. according to a “seven deadly sins” online quiz, my biggest sin is lust. my first love was a 1990 blue mazda minivan, who now lives at the dump but will live in my heart forever. j’adore shoes, funky sunglasses, and mismatched clothing, and i’m told i can pull off wearing almost anything, no matter how atrocious. i’m not sure if this is a compliment. i have a weakness for omlettes, beautiful wristbones, and vintage jewelry, sometimes all together. i am good at listening and bad at letting things go. i am very dumb in love. i can be quite jealous and irrational, but normally i blame this on my artsy nature. my goal in life is to live as the only starving artist in new york city with a princeton degree. my favorite novel is the agony and the ecstasy by irving stone, but what i love above all else is poetry. in the words of alice walker, “what is the point/of being artists/if we cannot save our life?”
exxxxactly.
fiona miller, january 2006