10 year book of memories
21
GEORGE BLAUSTEIN
CFHSS TF 2006. Harvard University.
I did not know what I was getting into when I signed on a decade ago to be a teaching fellow at the first Harvard Summer School in Venice. I had never been to Italy before, nor had I taught outside of the United States. I read some simple-Americans-in-Venice books: Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers”, William Dean Howells’s “A Foregone Conclusion”, Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad”. As guidebooks of a kind, they were still useful. It was satisfying to go to Venice for the first time with a job to do, relieved of the burdens of tourism. You could walk with purpose. You learned to navigate the city without looking at a map all the time. When it was really sweltering you avoided the Zattere, and graded the essays you had to grade in the shady garden behind Ca’ Bembo. It was rewarding to teach international students, whose insights into American literatures of immigration were sharp and fresh. But it wasn’t all work. We got used to spritzs in the early evening, and we watched the Redentore fireworks from a roof in Giudecca.
At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection our British guide helpfully pointed out when something was “terribly dada.” I saw the inside of San Marco only once, but I still recall how strange and vivid it was to be there with only a small group of students and faculty learning about ancient and medieval mosaics—quiet, without a crowd. The same group took a trip to Ravenna to see the mosaics there. The figure of Christ in San Vitale Basilica is clean-shaven, but the man who showed us around a modern mosaic workshop was gaunt and bearded. It is nice to think of oneself as a pioneer, and in that first summer it sometimes felt like we were navigating uncharted waters. My fellow TFs (Koray Durak, John Gasper and Imad Kodab) and I became the unofficial house deans, and managed our corner of the enterprise as best we could. Of course we saw only a sliver of the massive planning that went into the Summer School, but I nevertheless feel an undeserved pride that it has been so successful. Far outweighing that pride, though, is gratitude to the people I got to know and work with there. I learned more than I taught.