Rabbits, Toyen, and so forth

The New Blog

2009-06-20T00:08:00.002+02:00

The new installments of our adventures can be found at Rabbits Ate My Homework. No, I don't know what that means. Ask Orion about his dissertation-eating habits.

Graduation

2009-04-29T21:25:00.001+02:00

While technically I graduated in December, there isn't a ceremony then. The advantage of the spring ceremony is, I suppose, that it doesn't conflict with winter holidays. Well, and admittedly the lilacs begin to bloom around graduation time, which is a fine thing. And several of my colleagues were also graduating in the spring (three of them actually attended the ceremony), as did a fair number of my students and my friends from gamelan.
My department does a very nice ceremony of its own on the morning of the big ceremony, but it has almost become too successful: the auditorium was packed with families and I hear that quite a few people had to stand in the hall outside because the aisles were filled. (We refrained from alerting the Fire Marshall.) While it is nice to combine the Studio, Architectural Studies, and Art History festivities, I suspect it won't be feasible to continue to do so. I was planning to take pictures at the event, but completely failed to.
Before long, it was time to race off to the main graduation, which undertakes to do everyone from every school in the university all in one long afternoon. As such things go, it was pretty standard, but despite the airconditioning in the stadium, those of us wearing caps and gowns were sweating profusely. I don't know how any wool can rightly be described as "tropical," but better tropical wool than the synthetics that most people had gotten. Synthetics feel hot in a nastier way than natural fibers, and I am not about to endure that if I have any choice. What I don't understand is why, given that academic regalia is generally worn in the spring or summer, it is not made mostly of linen. We are not living in medieval days, when academics wore heavy robes to keep warm through the winter.
Still, I think Kristen and I looked rather festive in our regalia.

Kristen and I standing around awaiting our parents.

Kristen's parents arrived first.

My family did manage to explore the campus a bit too.

I had intended for there to be quite a few photos of various people around the Fine Arts building, but that didn't end up happening.

I also meant to take photos at the wine-and-cheese party my (and Kristen's) advisor threw us, but that didn't happen either. Eventually we went home, where at least there are plenty of trees in bloom.

And that's all. It will probably be about all for this blog as well, as the blog was intended to keep people up to date on my life and research in Prague, which ended two years ago. Kristen has inquired whether Facebook has lured me away from blogging, and the answer is decidedly not; different online activities have different uses. But there are limits, after all, to how much I can say about my life these days--at least without being annoying. I like blogging, but it has to have some purpose, even if a fairly vaguely defined one.
So, if there is something to say that fits this blog, I might add it, but otherwise I think the reasonable thing would be to start a different blog. After all, this one was mostly about being a PhD student, and now the PhD is done.
Time for something new and exciting.

Calypso Spots at Seven

2009-04-27T21:50:00.001+02:00

The blog has been lacking in new rabbit photos for much too long. The photos were taken awhile back, but getting around to doing anything with them was another matter.
Calypso Spots is now seven (we suppose her birthday was sometime in March) and she would like it known that she is nobody's Easter Bunny. When she is particularly relaxed, she likes to curl up in ridiculous naptime poses like this. Still, she likes to keep a watchful if sleepy eye on things. Someone might do something exciting, like bring out the chocolate.

Ms. Spots believes in encouraging her admirers to express their ecstatic love for her. Fortunately, Orion's tongue never gets tired.
The human in the household is ready to adopt this kind of life at a moment's notice, should the opportunity emerge.

As the Semester Ends...

2009-04-25T14:46:00.000+02:00

I've said it before, and my opinion hasn't changed: I've had very good students this semester. They write pretty well, most of them have some idea how to analyze what they're looking at, and all in all they've been a pleasure.
This does not, of course, alleviate the mingled pain and amusement that comes from the strange things I encounter on final exams. Even some of my best students have gotten certain things alarmingly wrong.
I am getting used to the fact that a certain number of people each semester come to the conclusion that René Magritte was a woman and that therefore I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest must be a feminist work.
I was not really expecting, however, to get an intelligent but wrong analysis of Sylvia Sleigh's Turkish Bath as being set in a gay bathhouse.
It is not okay to call collages, sculptures, and photographs "painting."
Frida Kahlo was not a Social Realist, and Alfred Stieglitz was not a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Surely I can cover more than one movement per week without this sort of confusion?
I am a bit disturbed at the number of people who have classified Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Worker (they are holding hammer and sickle) as Nazi art. It appears that even many students who correctly identified it as a Soviet-made sculpture are not familiar with the symbolism of the hammer and sickle, despite the fact that I am sure I talked about this in class. Seeing the sickle referred to as a "chisel" was also rather surprising. I don't think today's youth are using enough hand tools. Even the hammer wasn't always correctly identified as such.
In somewhat the same vein, everyone does a pretty good job discussing Grant Wood's American Gothic, but please, can we call a pitchfork a pitchfork? If I keep reading about how the man holds his tool tightly or grips his tool firmly, I may be unable to continue grading.
I realize that by mentioning these things, I run the risk of making my students look bad, but in a class of about 40, the miracle is that there isn't really all that much to complain of. Overall, I think nearly all of them have learned a lot and I am sorry to say goodbye to them.

The Return from Manchester and the AAH

2009-04-10T13:26:00.001+02:00

The AAH conference was satisfactorily interesting, although as my session took up both days, I didn't feel as though I could roam around investigating papers on all sorts of topics as I normally do at conferences. The only time I ventured out of my own session was to hear a paper on Toyen's collaboration with Radovan Ivšić, which was quite interesting in its discussion of the relationship of image to text. Otherwise, I was ensconced in the surrealist and surrealist-legacy camp, where we had a fair amount of Toyen already. (But there can never be too much Toyen, or at least not unless she becomes a figure of adulation like Frida Kahlo, and it may be that Kahlo's astounding celebrity is passing, given how few of my students have heard of her.)
Manchester looks like a place worth visiting, especially given that I didn't really have time to look around the museums where the various receptions were held. The town hall, where we were welcomed by the Lord Mayor (who has bright green hair and exhorted us repeatedly to sample the local nightlife), is an impressive gothic-revival building with a fine set of murals by Ford Madox Brown. I was hoping to see his Work, given that I had just shown it in class, but that was elsewhere and I was too tired to hunt it down.
The Intro to Modern papers have been duly turned in (most of them) and I have begun grading them. Thus far they're excellent and I feel vastly pleased. No one has gotten less than an A. Of course, that will not hold true for the entire class, but it would be nice if only it could.

Papers and More Papers

2009-03-30T14:55:00.001+02:00

As I prepare to leave town for the AAH conference in Manchester (that's the original British Manchester, not one of those upstart Manchesters that seem to exist in every eastern state here), my Intro to Modern students are in the throes of preparing their class papers.
They have the option of doing either an article comparison, which is intended to hone their analytical skills, or a research paper on a topic to be approved by me. The first time I taught this class, there were quite a few research papers, some of them remarkably good. Last semester there were not very many and some of those were evidently by students who needed further guidance on just what a research paper is, but there were also some outstanding papers. This semester the research papers will again be rather few, but I think they will be good. I will be getting one on Czech cubism, one on Croatian naive painting, one on the relationship of gay sexuality to the work of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, one on Picasso's Blue Period (this is an alluring topic for students, I have noticed), one on Magritte and philosophy, one on Magritte and Dali (I wait to see exactly where this goes), one on Abstract Expressionism, and one on Malevich and Suprematism.
A few papers will be coming in tomorrow to give me something to read on the plane, but most of them, I am sure, will be appearing in my box next Tuesday.
My Realism and Impressionism students have already done all their papers, while the Czech Modernism seminar has just turned in their rough drafts, which I have not had any time to examine. I suppose I might read those on the plane too.

Baudelaire and Clark

2009-03-22T13:50:00.000+01:00

I may complain a bit from time to time about infelicitous things in my students' exams and the like, but really I do have a very satisfactory group (well, three groups since I teach three classes) this semester.
While the number of things I need to get done (prep, grading, journal articles, etc.) tends to prompt feelings of alarm and angst, actually sitting down to grade the second batch of Realism and Impressionism papers has been quite pleasant. Nearly the entire class writes pretty well, and nearly all of them think through the material with admirable ability. In fact, nobody is having any serious problems, although I daresay some of them would like to get a somewhat better grade than they are earning. Thus, while I was a bit perturbed to find that the first two papers I read (examining Baudelaire's "The Painting of Modern Life" in conjunction with two chapters by T. J. Clark) failed to mention Baudelaire at all, those papers were generally all right in other respects. And the best papers in the class are really enjoyable, combining well-chosen quotations from Baudelaire and Clark with pertinent images and supple analysis of art and texts.
This makes me feel, temporarily, content.

The Joy of Exams

2009-03-18T11:17:00.001+01:00

While generally speaking, I think it's incumbent upon me to encourage my students, and while on the whole they are doing pretty well, there are always times when they invite their own doom and even (dare I say it?) some ridicule.
I always do a section of term definitions on my Intro to Modern midterm. Define twelve terms that relate to modern art, for one point each--given that these are all terms covered in class and that the book has a glossary defining most of them, how hard can this really be? Yet somehow this is a thing even my best students tend to have some trouble with. I think only one person thus far this semester has gotten full points.
I thought, for instance, that this semester I had really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Japonisme, because the majority of students define Orientalism incorrectly. But apparently I really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Primitivism (also a problem area), so while no one this semester is confusing that pair, most of the definitions for Orientalism are really definitions of Japonisme. This would not be so odd if it weren't that Orientalism is such a major theme in the academic world these days and I would have thought my students (unlike me) might have imbibed the works of Edward Said with their mothers' milk. I guess Orientalism is more the province of graduate students than of undergrads. I will, thus, keep trying to make clear that Orientalism generally involves eroticization of "exotic" foreign cultures, particularly Muslim cultures but also potentially Hindu and Far Eastern cultures. At least, that's Orientalism in 19th and early 20th century art. And it's not as though we haven't looked at a good many examples.
The very term Avantgarde is, for some reason, also problematic. A certain number of people always do get this right without the slightest difficulty, but a strangely large number always suppose it's a specific movement, or that it's "a new country's art movement" or some other odd thing.
And again, despite my continued efforts to clarify the meaning of Nonobjective art, students continue to define it as "art without a focus" and art that can mean different things to different people. I think some of them probably understand the term better than they are able to define it, but very few seem to state that it's art that doesn't depict something you can see out there in the real world. They don't seem to connect it with Malevich's Black Square (which they reserve for their definitions of Suprematism) or with Kandinsky's later work. Maybe I should make them define Nonobjective later in the semester, when they've seen more examples.
Of course, there are always some definitions that are simply humorous.
"Supermatism--It was an art movement that would just use simple geographic shapes to depict their work." I actually gave partial credit for this because despite the wording, it's clear the writer has some idea what Suprematism is. Anyone (myself included) might accidentally write "geographic" instead of "geometric." All the same, I'm envisioning Malevich attempting to depict the Black Square by means of a map of Moscow or Novosibirsk.
I guess Malevich will keep us amused. And so will all that fuzzy-looking subjective Nonobjective art. At least everyone seems clear on what Pointillism is, and nearly everyone can say something reasonable about Fauvism, despite the paucity of references to the term meaning "wild beast-ism".

Spring Arrives, Sort Of

2009-03-10T13:11:00.000+01:00

It's Spring Break, so therefore it must be spring. Actually, there seems to be some truth in this (never mind that spring isn't officially here), given that the temperature immediately soared into the 70s, a rather startling development given that the beginning of last week was down well below freezing and with reported wind chills in the negative degrees. I might, of course, have enjoyed the brief warm weather had it not been right when I wanted to devote myself to long-put-off projects like filing, spring cleaning, and tax preparation, and as the heat for the building was still on, my apartment was sweltering even with the windows wide open.
The sweaty weather has departed, leaving us with a more seasonally suitable cool and rainy spell that is well enough suited to the grading of the large stack of midterms that awaited me upon my return from CAA (which, being in Los Angeles, was also an encounter with above-70 weather but at least not very sweatily so).
Thus far the midterms for the 19th-century class are not quite up to the standard of the papers. They are not bad, but I have not read one yet that will be above a B+. There are some commonalities in what I'm reading that suggest the textbook is weaker than I thought on relating the art to the socio-political context--or simply that aspects of what it does say go right by. (This was a take-home exam.) For instance, I did think it was pretty clear that Napoleon and Napoleon III are not the same person, and that while the 19th century saw repeated revolutionary activity in France, the French Revolution itself was in the 18th century. Still, often a stack of exams magically clumps itself and all the best ones or worst ones are together. If those I've done so far prove to be the worst, I will be very content.
There are, however, stacks of other things to get done this week besides the exams, so I must return to my labors.

Win Some, Lose Some?

2009-02-23T23:04:00.001+01:00

I thought I was doing pretty well today: I met with most of my Czech Modernism students about their papers and the results were encouraging, and during lunch I made all the arrangements for going to AAH (the major British art history conference), where I'm giving a paper in April.
Then at the end of the day's gamelan rehearsal, I found out that our concerts will be earlier than usual this year. Precisely when I'll be in England giving my conference paper, in fact. I had been going on the assumption that the concerts would be at least a week later, as they normally are.
I am pretty unhappy about this. It is hard to say whether this or the beyond-bad job market is more annoying. Probably this, since despite the bad job market, I think it is likely I will have some sort of job next year. After all, if there are no teaching jobs, I can always go back to feeding photocopiers or being a factory worker or guarding a parking lot or doing some other thing out of my checkered past. Or even something I've never done before, like becoming a sewer inspector or performing artificial insemination on cattle. Yep, maybe I'm discounting the opportunities that lie before me. Settling into a comfy teaching position could be very bad for my fiction writing.

Experiments in Cooking

2009-02-22T09:56:00.000+01:00

The cookbook Down to Earth: Great Recipes for Root Vegetables has been tempting me for some years with its Green Onion and Gruyere Bread Pudding recipe. Not that I ever particularly intended to make the recipe as presented, since that would be alien to my character, but the notion of doing something savory and useful with stale bread has always been appealing.
I finally got around to it, which makes sense given that I should have been working on my book proposal, preparing the midterms, or at least scouring the sink.
My result, which is not all that much like the original beyond being a savory bread pudding, proved edible. I'm not entirely sure what one does to make the pudding avoid the standard drowned-bread stickiness, but it's true I didn't follow the recipe's direction to squeeze the soaked bread "as dry as possible" since the recipe indicated that the bread would be re-inundated and I believe in cutting out unnecessary steps.
Basically, I did the following:
Submerged about 10 smallish slices of bread (which already had baked-in nuts and cheese bits) in about 2 cups of "milk." The recipe called for 4 cups, but all I had was some half-and-half and some vanilla soymilk, so I combined these with water and hoped 2 cups total was enough. It certainly was. I don't know what would have become of the other 2 cups of milk. Probably a deluge.
Meanwhile (as the oven heated to 375), I beat 3 eggs.
I then chopped up a smallish onion and threw the pieces into a buttered 9x12-ish pan.
Getting more adventurous, I added four leftover olives of various types (chopped), quite a few capers, about half a jalapeno (given the tame nature of Pennsylvania jalapenos, it could probably have been 2), some walnut pieces, quite a bit of Parmesan cheese, and the remains of some Swiss cheese and an unidentified soft smoked French cheese.
I mixed all of this stuff together with wild abandon in the baking dish and shoved it into the oven, where it baked for about 40 minutes until the knife came out clean from the center.
I think it could have had more olives and cheese, and perhaps a few capers fewer, but other than the inevitable semi-sogginess, it was pretty good.

On the Positive Side...

2009-02-21T11:18:00.000+01:00

Things aren't actually all gloom and overwork around here. My students are really good (I say, not having yet given the midterms) and nearly all participate enthusiastically in class discussion, especially in the two larger classes where there isn't quite so much pressure to speak up as in the seminar. I enjoy the teaching once I'm in the classroom and no longer obsessing over whether I've prepared sufficiently. And on the whole they seem to be enjoying the courses too, apart from some anxiety surfacing lately about exams. Which will occur when I am out of town at CAA! (I planned that on purpose. One lecture class gets an in-class exam and a film on Frank Lloyd Wright, the other gets a take-home exam, and the seminar has no exam because its focus is on writing the research paper.)

Diligence Isn't Enough

2009-02-15T20:18:00.001+01:00

I have mostly spent my weekend on things I didn't think I could put off much longer: Saturday I prepared a batch of job applications (at least in terms of writing the letters and doing some online applications) and Sunday I put together most of the Powerpoint for a talk I'll be giving soon on women artists and the male nude.
The topic of the talk is one I once researched in considerable detail, but unfortunately that was before scanners were really affordable, so I had almost no images at hand. On the plus side, several of the artists I'll talk about have put up websites of their own (see, for example, Sylvia Sleigh, Martha Edelheit, Eunice Golden, and Diana Kurz). On the minus side, quite a few artists are ridiculously hard to find. I thought Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would be easy given that she did found a major museum, but evidently no one cares about her own sculptures. It's true she wasn't one of the 20th century's best sculptors, but she was quite competent and did her share of monuments and such.
It was this uncertainty about how easily I'd be able to find images that made me feel I could not possibly put this project off any longer despite the fact that there are other presentations I have to have done sooner. So, after spending awhile putting together material on the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London, I abandoned wondering just which Japanese art to add to my discussion of early Japonisme (Lotusgreen of Japonisme showed me some lovely books on the subject over the holidays but there remains work to do) and went hunting the nudes.
Just as I temporarily felt good about getting out some more job applications, for at least five minutes I felt good about getting most of the male-nude presentation done. Then the awareness of everything else returned. About ten more papers to grade. Two exams to prepare. Five Powerpoints to finish for the week's classes (they may be nearly ready but they are not done). A book proposal to complete. Why on earth did I waste time vacuuming the living room floor today? The fur was not quite covering the entire surface of the carpet yet...

Sylvia Sleigh, Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, 1977

You Can Rely on Malevich's Black Square...

2009-02-13T11:02:00.000+01:00

... to prompt controversy in every Intro to Modern class. Students generally find Cubist, Fauvist, Expressionist, and Futurist works palatable, but the minute Black Square goes up, a sense of outrage inevitably erupts. How can a plain black square be art, several people always demand to know. What kind of perversity is this and what kind of drugs was Malevich taking that he gave up doing odd but somewhat intelligible paintings of peasants and knife grinders in favor of the Black Square?
That's not to say that there aren't always other students who think the Black Square is a perfectly reasonable thing to paint, or who at least express a curiosity about what Malevich was trying to get across. But the Black Square is invariably the work that prompts a period of confusion and dismay that generally continues with Duchamp's Fountain and does not dissipate when we move into Dada. Things usually calm down by the time we get to Jackson Pollock, whether because everyone is acclimated or because we've had a break in the form of Regionalism, Social and Socialist Realism, and Nazi art. Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom, however, is usually good for stirring up the crowd again.

Immersed?

2009-02-10T22:23:00.000+01:00

Princess Haiku inquires whether the academic life is agreeing with me as I reach full immersion. I think I can say that mostly it does. My three courses are mostly enjoyable to teach and thus far I have cause to be pleased with my students. (I even have three from last semester who decided they could tolerate a second semester of me, which is gratifying. One of them even wanted to do an independent study with me.)
On the other hand, while my time is not entirely eaten up with school, enough of it is that often I find myself just a little too brain-dead to do anything very mentally demanding. This means that instead of doing some of the things I ought to do, I do things like obsessively scan yet more Czech modernist art on the theory that it will somehow benefit my students and the ... um ... rest of humanity.
That being the case, I'm finding fun stuff like this 1913 architectural drawing by Petr Kropáček.

Things That Don't Work as Expected

2009-02-08T18:13:00.000+01:00

Ah yes. Am I attracting undesirable magnetic or other forces? The phone ceased to work right around the time I expected that calls about job interviews might reasonably begin to come in (borrowed phone has not gotten any such calls, to be sure). The car first acted as though it was out of gas when I knew it had over a quarter of a tank, and now it additionally behaves as though it has a dead battery (it has not sat that long, surely). As of today, after some weeks of observation, I have concluded that certain Port Authority buses just don't run despite remaining on the schedule, meaning that one can stand around in the cold for nearly an hour wondering why none of the advertised buses have shown up. And now all of a sudden the laptop doesn't want to recognize that it's plugged in. It was happily plugged in upstairs in the library, but of course there the wifi wasn't working so I couldn't look up the bus schedule.
There had better not be anything wrong with the laptop cord. I have been strenuously keeping it away from Orion, but all it takes is the right test-bite.

Busy or Just Wasting Time?

2009-02-07T20:46:00.001+01:00

Regular readers might be wondering whether I've become lazy, overwhelmed, or have been taken into computerless custody by irritated rabbits. I am not entirely sure which except that the rabbits have not actually gotten me away from the computer. In fact, at the moment they are comfortably reclining under a chair, having extracted extra petting because I spent the entire day at home.
But it's true I've been spending quite a bit of time doing this-that-and-the-other thing related to teaching, and one of those things has been the lengthy process of making what must be well over 2000 reproductions of Czech art readily available to my students and other interested persons. One of these pictures is in fact now illustrating a post over at A Journey Round My Skull, in case anyone wants to see an early (cubist) Otto Gutfreund sketch.
It has also been my intention, for the past several days, to post the list several of my colleagues have compiled relating to the things tables are used for, but I keep not having the list on me at the moments when I think about blogging. My apologies to Robert and Aaron for my sluggish ways, as no doubt they have been anxiously waiting for this to go online. Art historians have to occupy their minds with strange conceptual matters from time to time in order to prevent becoming too preoccupied with actual art objects.
And there you have it.

Archelaus Examines Fiscal Crisis

2009-01-30T22:23:00.000+01:00

The Archelaus Cards light-hearted blog Ruination and Despair has lately been focusing on historic cartoons about the Great Depression. Check them out at The Stock Market Crash, Prosperity is Just Around the Corner, Hard Times, and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Now It's Online

2009-01-28T21:05:00.000+01:00

There's nothing like saying something hasn't happened to ensure that it will. Or so it sometimes seems. I was expecting it to take three or four months for my dissertation to go online at school, but it went up today. So, for those who really want to read about Toyen, Czech surrealism, and related topics, it's available for download. And now I really need to get back to work on writing the book proposal. Or at least thinking about how to grade the papers my seminar students just turned in discussing what Miloš Jiránek (1900) and Bohumil Kubišta (1911) had to say about Czech nationalism in art. Because the next set of papers to grade are on Romantic landscape in relation to the ideas of Burke, Hazlitt, and various German critics.
Meanwhile, the car refuses to start and the phone refuses to acknowledge that there really is a dial-tone coming in. That's just great. Fortunately I've been able to borrow an alarmingly high-tech phone so that if anyone tries to reach me to schedule a job interview, I might actually get the message. (It's all mystifying because no rabbits have chewed any cords and the internet still functions. So it must be the phone itself.)

Another Done Dissertation is a Good Dissertation

2009-01-22T11:53:00.001+01:00

I'm not the only person with a newly done dissertation. My friend Christine finished hers and defended beautifully to a whole roomful of people the first week of class (I'm not sure whether that full roomful was due to the time of the semester, to her being in Communication instead of Art History, or just to her personal magnetism... we'll say the last was a key factor). Christine even has a book contract already. But neither Christine's dissertation nor mine are online yet as the university moves slowly on that and Proquest moves even more slowly.
Danah Boyd, whose blog posts I sometimes note, has also just finished and as her dissertation is on social networking, it is hardly surprising that it is already online. Check it out and learn all you ever wanted to know about teenagers and social networking sites. I think the next topic to be dealt with is how the rest of us use these sites, a thing that has been intriguing me of late (when avoiding actual work and importunate rabbits).

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T21:55:00.000+01:00

I'm quite thankful to our departmental secretary for scheduling my classes so that I wasn't teaching during the presidential inauguration. I had not bothered to watch the last two (in fact I'm not sure when I last watched an inauguration), but we had the CNN internet live coverage coming into the Fine Arts auditorium and invited all and sundry to join us there. At least, I invited all my students and some of them definitely came along.
As inaugurations go, I'd say this was a pretty good one. Well orchestrated, pretty good choices of performers and speakers, and a historic, articulate president-elect with an attractive family. It was good watching the event in a group and having the sense of collective excitement and optimism.
Given the state of the world these days, I think the new administration will more than have their work cut out for them, but I'm looking forward to seeing what they do and how they do it.
Later on my advisor and I went out to dine and celebrate feeling generally positive about the future (which includes our general hopes about my employment prospects as well as the larger picture). After all, we have a new president, my courses are going along pretty well, and so despite the rather arctic weather and having too much to do, we feel pretty good.

UPS Comes Through

2009-01-16T10:34:00.000+01:00

Orion examines an eagerly awaited item that arrived for his human today and suggests that its frame might be considered edible. His human says no. Oil paintings are not edible. Paintings are not the province of the lapine community. Especially paintings by and of people we've known.

Lapines Complain Bitterly

2009-01-13T16:42:00.001+01:00

Ms. Spots and Orion would like to make it known that their human spends far too much time "working" when she should be attending to their petting and other needs. They are not altogether sure what this "working" stuff is all about other than that it involves going to places called "school" and "the cafe" and spending way too much time on that stupid laptop, but they state categorically that they are utterly opposed to this misuse of their human's valuable time.
The Spotted Pair admits that the negligent human did finally buy them fresh hay, pellets, and litter the other day, and came up with a passable selection of greens (collard, dandelion, and parsley) recently. The human has been very recalcitrant about confessing where the cookies were hidden, however, and seems to be hiding a bar of chocolate in one of the backpacks.
The Spotted Pair supposes that maybe there will be a letup sometime soon, but figures it's best not to lay bets on that. They are tired of hearing "I'll see you rabbits later."

Ruination & Despair!

2009-01-04T13:29:00.000+01:00

I realize that many of my readers believe in making New Year's resolutions (a thing I don't believe I have done myself since I was about 17), and indeed my friend Dirk says he has resolved not to replace any more of his joints in 2009, while my father, on the other hand, resolves to replace his other hip as soon as he can get the surgeon's attention.
Certainly, it's important to start the new year off right, and I'm happy to say that my friendly local rheumatologist has not suggested that any of my own joints need replacing, although I'm sure my dentist would be happy to give me another crown or two.
On the other hand, not everything in life can be fixed, so right around now one of my relatives is going off her respirator and getting the last painkillers. We hope it's a comfortable exit (her son says she will "expire," which is definitely a step up from "passing away") and that she ends up where she'd like to rather than in what is sometimes referred to as "the other place" (although in my immediate family "the other place" now refers to New Zealand after my father's memorable remark that not only did we know people who had lived in Australia but also in "the other place"--our apologies to the inhabitants of New Zealand).
And I've been invited to a year-later memorial for my friend Milt Wolff. I won't be able to attend due to my hectic teaching schedule, but I've been contemplating getting a framed enlargement of one of my livelier photos of Milt, which I think would look nice somewhere on the wall. It would definitely be better than the photos I took the week before he died, anyhow.
In the general spirit of getting everything off to a good start before we all get too excited about the Obama inauguration, I direct everyone to the new Archelaus blog, Ruination & Despair. You can discover the perfect name for your six-fingered child, learn the correct diet for walking on water, and even find out which new Archelaus cards have just debuted. It's just the thing!

Happy New Year and the Like

2009-01-01T22:36:00.000+01:00

Orion and Ms. Spots wish everyone a Happy New Year. Their human is sniveling considerably (both literally and figuratively) and wants to know why the internet has been acting so dial-up-like in its speed these past few days, causing her to take hours and hours to do things with Artstor and Blackboard that would normally only take... well, fewer hours and hours.
In the New Year there will be additional postings of Who Should Do Your Portrait. We are also planning a new, somewhat similar game also invented by the intrepid art history grad students. Stay tuned!

Questionable Bits

2008-12-17T11:08:00.000+01:00

On the whole, the American Art papers are very agreeable to read: pretty literate and usually showing a good degree of understanding of their topics. But they would not be student papers if there were not occasional lapses in phrasing and thought, would they? For example:
"Lovell tried to show how the American family photo evolved over time across the 18th century." (Photos in the 18th century?!)
And, on an exam, one student identifies Harlem Renaissance painter Palmer Hayden as Arnold Palmer. Well, I suppose Palmer Hayden may have played golf and Arnold Palmer may have painted, but they're not the same person. Another student, while correctly stating that Edmonia Lewis was the first woman of African and Native American descent to make her career in art, got a little carried away and said she was the first woman to go to college, which she was not (although she was one of Oberlin's earlier nonwhite female students). Another rather charming error: Emmanuel Leutze's Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way was identified as Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Toll. I have to admit I much prefer the latter title.
I was delighted to see evidence of considerable study on the Intro to Modern exams. Of course, there were still some errors of fact and interpretation, and most of the students could have written more, but they really made a pretty universal effort to learn the material in the second half of the course. Major progress for some of them, especially those with no prior background in art history (which was really most of the class).
Really, despite the occasional weird bits, I am quite happy with both groups.

Portraits--Brief Thoughts

2008-12-16T22:20:00.000+01:00

More thoughts on who to have do one's portrait.
Cathy, whom I have known since junior high, suggests:

"I'd say Dali. Melting clocks, autistic outlook, has a museum in Miami where it's always sunny. My kind of guy."

Salvador Dalí, Mae West

Frank, who once co-chaired NWU Local 3 with me, says:

"I've always thought that the men in Bruegel's paintings looked like me, but I don't think he did portraits. (I'm reading Michael Frayn's novel, Headlong, and I think he mentions that.) But anyway, someone Flemish. Rembrandt?
I wouldn't want to be painted by Francis Bacon just because, jeez, think of what I'd have to be doing ... "

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Peasant Wedding, 1568

We still have some responses in line to post...

Portraits--More Art Historians Speak Up

2008-12-13T13:52:00.000+01:00

Now that I have a moment free (having turned in the paperwork for graduation and graded 20 of the 70 exams), I suppose it is time to return to the Portrait Question, which has been of ongoing interest to both the art historians and the other interested parties.

Saskia says:

"Here's my contribution to your project. I'm basing this totally on aesthetic preferences, and not on some deep psychological sense of self fashioning.

I have to admit that part of me would love to have a portrait done by Tamara Lempicka - I love the style of her women; they are somehow both supremely feminine and coldly angular. In a similar sort of way, I would also love to imagine myself as an Erte, though that's more about the fabulous and ludicrous clothes. (I blame it on having had these paper dolls as a kid. Or what about the Italian futurists? DId they ever do portraits? I'm guessing no, since they were all about modernism and technology and movement, but I would be fascinated to see what someone like Boccione would do with a human subject. Besides, his color sense is so spectacular. I also like that none of these are what people would expect me to pick. I hate being predictable! I bet everyone would assume I'd say Judith Leyster, who would also do a wonderful portrait. Her self portrait painting is so joyful that who could resist?

I completely veto the following: Cranach (helllo, body dismorphia!), Brancusi (too minimalist), and de Kooning (too untidy)."

Tamara de Lempicka, Young Woman in Green, 1927

Judith Leyster, Self Portrait, 1635

Sarah B leaves medieval art out of the question for once and says:

"I would like either Matisse or Diebenkorn to paint my portrait.

Matisse: I love the way he juxtaposes many patterns or intense hues of colors in his interior spaces which surround his figures. (Though I don't love his odalisques)

Diebenkorn: Extraordinary color! And a wonderful simplification of complex forms with carefully placed brushstrokes of thick paint."

Henri Matisse, Madame Matisse: Madras Rouge, 1907

Richard Diebenkorn, Woman in Profile, 1958

And we're not done yet!

Defense Done

2008-12-08T23:42:00.001+01:00

One cannot complete a PhD without the help of one's departmental secretary. (Or, very likely, go in to the defense without some coffee, at least when somehow there hasn't been time for either breakfast or lunch.)

I was asked to start off with a little introductory piece about how the project developed and what possessed me to undertake it or alter it or spend such an abnormal amount of time reading old Czech magazines.

My committee seemed to want me to expound on quite a few things, and looked very grave when not in fits of laughter. Their first question was why I hadn't put the title on the manuscript. As usual, I couldn't remember what on earth I had called it. This prompted various suggestions which were regarded as extremely witty and which went by far too quickly for me to write down.

After the committee admitted that they thought it was a pretty good dissertation, and after they had incited me to blather on for an hour or so about who knows what, we decided it was time for the champagne.

Some people weren't sure whether I was capable of opening a champagne bottle without help. It's true I hadn't opened one in awhile and had forgotten that a corkscrew is not needed.

I managed to spill only a small amount of champagne, none of it on the dissertation itself.

Finally we had the glasses filled and proceeded to clink our fancy departmental plasticware.

Finally, my advisor examined an Archelaus card and wanted to know why I had failed to thank her for "the embroidered codpiece."

Photos by Kristen.

Almost Done?

2008-12-07T21:23:00.001+01:00

Since tomorrow I get to defend my dissertation, today we'll take a break from the intriguing and sometimes startling world of portraiture.
People keep telling me "You're almost done," but since I have no shortage of papers to grade, 70 exams about to follow, job applications to send out, three classes to prepare for next semester, and miscellaneous other things to deal with, my usual reaction to that is "Huh? What's almost done?" It only gradually dawns on me that they must be referring to the PhD process.
I met with my advisor on Friday to see if she had any particular suggestions for the big event. To a large extent her mind was on her new subzero-rated down coat (good) and on recent university budget cuts (bad), but we had a pleasant chat about the defense and my future in general. She did not anticipate anyone saying anything too annoying, or perhaps even anything at all annoying, at the defense, and she suggested I get busy writing my book proposal and picking out my top choices among the various university presses. Well--she did not say I had to do that before 2009, merely "in the next couple of months." I interpret that as meaning "before College Art Association." I guess there is some chance that would be possible. At this point in my life a book proposal is no longer the terrifying project it once was; it's just something you sit down and do when you have time. (Time? what's that?)
So... tomorrow at 12:30 we'll all gather and talk about this large thing I've produced. One of my committee members called me last night, in the midst of reading, to suggest I hasten to read a new article on Karel Teige in the Slavic Review. I'm not so sure what the rush is. I looked up the article. I've gone out for drinks with its author and think his dissertation was excellent. Do I really need to read the article right away? Why not next week or next month? But at least my committee member admitted to enjoying my dissertation and mentioned a press I should consider approaching. I hear that another committee member also finds the dissertation enjoyable, so we'll assume that the remaining member feels the same way.
I'm glad that I'm at a university that still does dissertation defenses, that I'm in a department that doesn't schedule them until the dissertation is passable, and that all in all it's something to look forward to instead of to dread. (Of course, some people hope it could be arranged to involve armed combat, see comments here. There's no accounting for individual perversity.)
I think I will now return to grading the American Art papers, which thus far have been gratifyingly good.

Portraits and Odd Awards

2008-12-06T19:26:00.000+01:00

Dr. Zaius, who discusses his portrait choices further here, has also seen fit to give me the somewhat mysterious Marie Antoinette Award. I have no idea what this award was originally intended to connote, but Dr. Zaius claims it is just another award one gives to blogs one likes. I'm a bit suspicious of this--Marie Antoinette?! This is a woman who was beheaded for her frivolity and general bad PR, after all.
I guess I could pass it on to a select few people who might be able to think up political or other useful rationales, like Geoff, Mildly Annoyed Rabbit, and Bikerbar. I mean, you can't exactly give a Marie Antoinette Award to just any blog you like, can you?
Marie Antoinette did commission some fine portraits of herself, however.

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marie Antoinette and Her Children, 1787

Portraits--Cartoon Choices

2008-12-05T08:23:00.000+01:00

Shawn, who spends his days contemplating the political lives of the Czech avant-garde, says:

"Interesting idea. Obviously this is not such a simple question, as so few questions are. What am I looking for out of this portrait? Obviously, to have one's portrait from an Italian master would be amazing, and amazingly valuable, but then it would mean either that A) you'd be long since dead or B) some weird x-files shit has been going on. I don't know, if I could just dodge the complexities of the question, and of course dodging complexities are never so easy, I would pick Adolf Hoffmeister to do my portrait. On the one hand, I feel like picking Dali or Picasso would be too stereotypical and easy. After all, I don't want my portrait to be some visual kitsch; it would need some novelty to it. On the other hand, I feel drawn to someone like Kandinsky or maybe even Francis Bacon, but then again, I feel like some visual likeness would be important to me. After all, if it's my "portrait" I would want it to portray a visual likeness.

In fact, that's precisely why I'd pick Hoffmeister. I want the most essential, simple visual likeness possible. Hoffmeister, as you know, had a penchant for reducing his subjects to the most simple traits; depicting individuals with a few, sometimes a single, line. This is what fascinates me most: How could an artist summarize my visual likeness, my caricature, my being, in the most simple, essential matter? What are those one or two visual traits that essentially define me in some recognizable way? I would guess my glasses, maybe my brow, but is that really what defines me? A mere "resemblence" does not necessarily excite me; I have drawn enough
self-portraits to know what I look like in pencil etchings. But I want to see myself with as little baggage as possible, an ur-"I" if you will. That interests me alot."

Adolf Hoffmeister, The Avant-garde, 1930
L-R: Karel Teige, Vítězslav Nezval (Shawn's very favorite avant-gardist because of the beachball-torso effect), Jindřich Honzl, Jan Werich, Jiří Voskovec

Dr. Zaius states:

"I would like to have my portrait done by the wildly imaginative comic book artist Jack Kirby because of his great talent at drawing alien landscapes, outlandish machines and deliciously evil supervillians, especially Dr. Doom."

And still more weird and wonderful choices to come!

Portraits--Writers and Suchlike

2008-12-04T08:28:00.000+01:00

Moving right along with our Who Should Do Your Portrait inquiry, Dirk (who actually reads my fiction as well as this blog) suggests:

"Holbein. You can’t beat him for portraits. His people look so
intensely themselves. Piero Della Francesca would be acceptable too.

Two I don’t want are Watteau and Goya. I like Watteau, but all his people simper, and I love and admire Goya, but most of Goya’s people look crazed."

Hans Holbein the Younger, Boniface Amerbach, 1519

Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo Malatesta, 1451

Dirk's friend Larry (we have not met but I think we have both heard various stories about one another over the years) says:

"Absolutely Holbein. His Thomas More (at the Frick) is the finest portrait I believe I have ever seen, apart from the Rembrandt self-portraits, a class of their own. There also is an extraordinary painting at the Met of a young man by an Italian Renaissance artist, and I can't remember which one. It could be Piero della Francesca. On the other hand, the question is about my own portrait, and in that case I might prefer the painterly depth of the great Rembrandts. Whistler would be acceptable, too."

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More, 1527

James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Carlyle, 1872-3

Larry continues:

"At the other end of the stylistic spectrum is the extraordinarily talented Paul Helleu, a high-fashion artist of the turn of the century and one of Proust's models for the painter Elstir. As a side note, I was one of the actor/models in Eleanor Antin's Angel of Mercy, a performance piece about the life of Florence Nightingale. One aspect of the piece was a sequence of very beautiful photographs, mostly composed after famous paintings of the nineteenth century. I was a friend of the family in these photographs and was seen playing croquet, listening at a window as Florence played the piano, and leaning back to back with a painter named Patricia Patterson (widow of the recently deceased Manny Farber). In that photo, taken in the open, I was wearing a straw hat and painting on a canvas propped against a rowboat. Only much later, when a friend in St. Louis spotted this photograph in an article in Arts magazine, did I learn that the couple in the original painting by John Singer Sargent (at Brooklyn Museum) were Paul Helleu and his wife. When I asked Eleanor why she didn't tell me I was momentarily Paul Helleu, she replied that I would have ruined the shot had I known, and she probably was right. I loved the nineteenth century clothing, though I wouldn't want to wear it every day.

As to painters one would rather avoid, include Goya's idiots and Bosch and Daumier and all the great German Expressionists and Neue Sachlichkeit artists -- Nolde, Kirchner, Marc, Beckmann, Grosz, Dix, etc., etc. Also Ensor, Soutine, Giacometti -- in fact, most of the modern canon."

Paul Helleu, Portrait of Clara Weil

Geoff, who is a friend of both mine and Dirk's, says:

"Francis Bacon, because he'd paint me the way he sees me and not the way I see me. And because the result would very likely be uglier than the original even in other people's eyes. But if Francis isn't available (after all, he died 16 years ago), then maybe Daumier. In fact, I think he already did depict me pretty accurately, early one morning before my first cup of coffee:

But if I have to sit (or stand) for a portrait for hours on end, I think I'd rather subject myself to Artemisia Gentileschi.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Portrait of a Condottiero, 1622

This is me after that first cup of coffee, when I've finally got my hair combed.

Thanks for posing this question. The more I think about it, the surer I am that I'd be happy to have any artists use me as a subject, just to see all the variations possible and as an insight into how each artist treats a common subject differently. The artists I would avoid (or put low down on the list) would include Irving Penn and others likely to create a too-glamorous look. Georg Grosz or Ben Shahn would be good, though -- rough and bristly."

And, of course, more to come!

Portraits--Is van Gogh High on the List or Ultimately Not?

2008-12-03T08:10:00.001+01:00

In today's installment of Who Should Do Your Portrait, our respondents started off with strangely similar lists but ultimately they diverged a fair amount.

Paul K of BibliOdyssey responds:

"This is all rather silly in so far as me myself and I hardly come into the rationale for my response.

Watteau is because of the white chalk (and I have just spent a godawful amount of time not finding the right example) and because I like the 'study' aspect.

The engravers [Dürer, Hopfer, and Cranach] are (kind of) interchangeable and I like them for their ability to capture detail: photographers, one and all, of the 16th c.

Lautrec because we all want the exuberance within to be made manifest.

And van Gogh to capture (?imprison) all of me. And so I can shimmer."

After further thought:

"It's much more about [van Gogh's] ability to render a character, whichever character (although maybe selfportraits are where my ideas derive from) in toto, the communicate not only their likeness and personality but to imbue the picture with that 'shimmering' factor -- it gives the subject a kind of 3rd dimensional life.

And I guess re: engravers, I think of the Landsknechte-types eg. bold, daring, man's man, cavalier. As I said, they are the photographers (with a bit of editorial input no doubt) of the 16th c. They're stylistic character renderings."

Daniel Hopfer, Soldier and Woman

Toulouse-Lautrec, Aristide Bruant, 1893

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, 1889

Todd states:

Not wishing to frighten the rabbits, I am inclined to avoid too realistic an approach to this particular subject. My first instinct is therefore to suggest Jackson Pollock or perhaps Kazimir Malevich. [Editor's note: The rabbits have never thought Todd looked at all frightening--George used to hop forward to greet him--but we don't know how they would react to Pollock or Malevich.]
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913

Among artists better known for actual portraiture, however, Rembrandt would surely have done something instructive, for he tended to concentrate on some interesting aspect of character rather than on how good-looking the sitter was.

Rembrandt, Matthew and the Angel

For similar reasons, I could imagine something appealing by Bohumil Kubišta, though preferably from his early, more impressionist phase rather than from his later, cubist one.

Bohumil Kubišta, Self Portrait, 1908

While Van Gogh and Kokoschka are also possibilities, I'm inclined to think there is too much risk they would make me look crazy -- which might be okay if they were obscure artists, but since a work by Van Gogh in particular would inevitably immortalize the sitter, one would prefer not to look even more peculiar than dictated by nature.

Finally, I must admit to being tempted by Hans Holbein the Younger. For some reason I think the garb of an early sixteenth-century northern European merchant might suit me.

Hans Holbein, Georg Gisze, a German merchant in London, 1532

More responses coming shortly!

Portraits--More Art Historians Weigh In

2008-12-02T08:19:00.000+01:00

Shalmit says:

"After our talk the other day, I recalled that Kathy Linduff gave us once in a seminar a similar task: it was a seminar about the 'other', and we were to talk about how we would like to be portrayed. this turned of course into a discussion about identity, and how people choose to show themselves to the world. It would probably be interesting to ask her of her impressions.

I remember that at that time I simply could not see myself being frozen in time for the sake of next generations. For some reason, any suggestion of 'posing' gives me such a strong feeling of crippling artificiality. For this reason, I guess I would have chosen Rembrandt for his strong psychological depth, and perhaps Lucian Freud for not trying to beautify his objects. A naked portrait of me by Freud (I guess that in his case I should not use the word nude), would probably drive away from my living-room all the boring guests..."

Rembrandt, Portrait of his wife Saskia

Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995

Kristen says:

"Probably Zinaida Serebriakova because she does amazing treatments of the 'fuller' female body. Though Natan Altman's portrait of Anna Akhmatova is pretty amazing."

Zinaida Serebriakova, Self Portrait

Natan Altman, Anna Akhmatova, 1914

I didn't really have any Serebriakova portraits of women with fuller figures handy, but I think the Lucian Freud more than makes up for any excessive slenderness in the Serebriakova.

Portraits--Two Photographic Responses

2008-12-01T01:41:00.006+01:00

Here are two of the early responses to my query about which artist(s) people would like to have do their portrait.

Travis says:

"I would choose to be painted by the Chicago Portrait Company. I think that there is a certain straightforwardness to what they did. Paintings from photos. How modern. And I also like their dishonesty. The company hired a bazillion people across America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to go door to door selling painted 'portraits in colors' made from 'small photographs.' And the results were quite beautiful. (I am writing about one in my dissertation.) The salesmen sent the small photos to Chicago, where a fleet of artists copied them in oil or reverse glass. The salesman returned a few months later to deliver the masterpiece. Some shadiness comes with delivery, as you were not told the prices of frames when you bought the portrait. Surprise! A frame costs just as much as the painting. But you pay anyway. And now you have something to hang over your mantle."

Alex O. says:

"I always thought I'd want Richard Avedon to do my portrait. His searing portraits of Americans of all walks of life in The American West and, on the other side of the professional photographic spectrum, his work with Gianni Versace in the '90s, inspired me to take up photography and pretty soon I was obsessed.

Photographs who embrace human subjects have to be enormously charismatic, persuasive or trustworthy. 'Collaboration' was a fashionable term, the notion of a symbiotic harmonious relationship between sitter and photographer carried a comfortably romantic connotation. But Avedon took an antagonistic view, claiming that the portrait was a 'contest' between photographer and subject, and that excellence was produced only when the photographer won. He had an amazing ability to reduce people to their barest selves, isolated against that empty white background, and a reputation that apparently prompted Henry Kissinger to ask of the photographer, 'Have mercy on me.' Avedon's images were clear and cruel and so, so compelling.

I always wanted to know what I would look like as an Avedon; I even began to fantasize that I might understand something better about myself if I could see myself through his eyes. And then others, too, could look at that version of me, and see, finally, my depressive, destructive self-loathing. The black truth, brought up from the depth of my soul, a depth much deeper than the size of my body, could come to reside on the visible level of my skin. It would make me ugly, and then people could see how close I was living to death.

Incidentally, one of my favourite portraits is of Avedon himself. It's intense and haunting. He was quite charming and handsome when he was young, working for Harper's Bazaar and revolutionizing fashion photography."

More responses to come!

Who Should Do Your Portrait?

2008-11-30T18:53:00.001+01:00

Some days ago, several of us art historical types got onto the topic of who, in the entire known history of art, we might like to have do our portraits. This is a fairly complex question since it isn't really about which artists we like, although that comes into it to some extent. It's possible to admire an artist considerably without having any real desire to have that person do one's portrait; it's also possible to think a given artist would do an interesting portrait but not think one would really care to put such portraits on the top of the wish-list. The initial group of us tended, for example, to think that Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, and Otto Dix were not exactly high on our lists even though we would not turn them down should they ask to portray us.
Alice Neel, Portrait of Joe Gould, 1933

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1967

George Grosz, The Engineer Heartfield, 1920

Otto Dix, Sylvia von Harden, 1920s
I'll be posting some responses on artists people would like to be portrayed by, but in the meantime I think we will start close to home.

Calypso Spots thinks she would like to be painted by Beatrix Potter despite the fact that Potter doesn't seem to have done any lops or spotted rabbits.

Orion thinks he would be better served by Albrecht Dürer.

Nice Little Surprises

2008-11-25T23:36:00.000+01:00

One of my students stayed after class to ask a question about her paper, and we got into a longer conversation, as often happens. When she mentioned that she planned to become a vet and start a small-animal practice, I said she should consider specializing in animals like rabbits and guinea pigs.
It turned out that not only does she have a rabbit of her own and not only is she a rabbit volunteer with the local shelters, but she's currently fostering the enchanting Sophia in the hopes that her rabbit will fall in love with the visitor. Sophia is even moving toward being litterbox-trained (she is one of the only rabbits I've ever met who did not believe in litterboxes).
I've certainly met people who turned out to know one or more of my friends, but the other day when I was watching a program about network theory and "six degrees of separation," it did not occur to me that I'd be discovering that one of my students and I know some of the same shelter rabbits.

And on to Philadelphia...

2008-11-18T22:05:00.000+01:00

where the year's AAASS conference is taking place. Kristen and I are headed out first thing in the morning (that is to say, around 10:00) and will be feeding upon bagels on our way.
While on the whole I suppose I have things in a relatively manageable condition--rabbits corralled, a new supply of antibiotic purchased, rabbit-sitter ready to medicate twice a day--and I have mailed off something very non-dissertation-like written over the summer--and none of my students have had mental breakdowns yet although one is about to have child #4 at any moment--etc etc--I feel that all I really want to do at the moment is go into a deep sleep during which Orion will be medicated into complete health, all of my job applications will be written and mailed, next semester's courses will be made perfect and put up on Courseweb, and publishers will be begging me to favor them with my work. All those little sorts of things.
I believe I will go and contemplate my suitcase.

Never Feel Momentarily OK

2008-11-16T18:24:00.000+01:00

On the whole, I enjoy this whole academic adventure. When in the mood, I don't mind working at it seven days a week.
But I really dislike feeling as though seven days a week is necessary not to fall behind. This makes me irritable. So today I thought perhaps I could take the day off.
Apparently not. When I returned from the library with some fiction in hand, I discovered Orion having a sneezing fit. RELAPSE! I rapidly corralled both rabbits into the X-pen and medicated the sniffly one, to his fury. Ms. Spots showed no particular annoyance at being confined, until she tried to be friendly to The Angry One, who began to take out his aggressions on her instead of on the wire. He began chasing her around in a malignant frenzy and trying to bite her, so I had to take her out. She was quite upset at her devoted admirer turning on her like that. Usually they only have spats about treats, and not in a limited space.
I then turned to checking my email and found the advice that I should (to all intents and purposes) plaster the civilized world with my job applications. This is depressing. I was hoping ten or twenty would be enough.
As if that weren't enough, the only suitable looking film I could rustle up to have shown on Thursday has to be brought from storage (it is a reel film), might not arrive in time, and will have to be shown by someone or other specially brought in for the purpose. Not really what I had in mind.
I don't feel any happier than Orion, but at least I'm not biting anything or anyone. Yet.

Defense Scheduled and All That

2008-11-15T22:01:00.001+01:00

My dissertation defense has been duly scheduled for December 8, the same day I give my Modern students their final.
"Brilliant, brilliant," exclaimed one of my committee members as I handed him his copy of the thing. I pointed out that I hoped he would still be saying that after actually reading it. He must be optimistic, as supposing he concludes that it is tedious and lacking in any merit whatsoever? (Unlikely, but you can never tell about these things. Just because my advisor likes it doesn't mean anyone else will.)
The tradition of the dissertation defense is, I gather, gradually disappearing. It is fine with me that I will not be defending my work tooth and nail against fierce criticism in an amphitheater full of people--we sort of go on the humane principle that a dissertation shouldn't get to the defense stage if it isn't passable, so I anticipate a fairly pleasant talk with the committee about what to do with the thing next. But people who got their PhDs at UC Berkeley and UC Davis tell me that all they had to do was turn their dissertations in. No defense, no conversation, no champagne, no nothing.
While I guess that's better than having an unruly committee member beat you to a figurative pulp over some minor point of interpretation, it sounds pretty dull to me. What, you slave over the dissertation for years and then no one even wants to talk about it, you just fill out some forms? Faugh. The UC Berkeley alum who told me this (she had to defend her MA in an amphitheater in Russia) said she thought all these famous types were just too busy (or thought they were too busy) to collect for a face-to-face meeting. My source from Davis didn't opine on why her department doesn't do defenses. (Note: neither of the above are art historians. I will not divulge their specialties to reporters and papparazzi.)
Meanwhile, life continues along in its usual dynamic and action-packed manner. My students are barraging me with email questions about their papers. I am wrestling with the final form of next semester's syllabi and presentations. There are job applications to prepare. I have a book chapter to write and provide images for. What sort of film can I find to have shown to my American Art students while I'm away in Philadelphia carousing with other Slavic scholars next week? People who have danced with me at some point or other greet me in cafes and want to know when I will return to the dance floor (preferably immediately, they imply, and in their company). And the Spotted Pair speeds across the living room floor as I type, stopping only for a spot of mutual grooming in mid-carpet.
Well, at least I have succeeded in condensing a five-page book outline into a two-page synopsis this evening. This might allow me to feel productive until tomorrow morning or so, when I'll fret because the post office isn't open and I'll have to be content with doing the laundry.

Nearly There

2008-11-11T21:11:00.001+01:00

I had, of course, hoped that I'd be able to breeze through the comments on my dissertation and get printouts to the rest of my committee this morning or at least in the early afternoon, but of course life never quite works that way.
As far as what I was supposed to fix and rework, there really was not much, and I was actually able to do nearly all of it Monday without any real problem. However, there were some bits of tricky translation still awaiting smoothing out, and furthermore, my advisor wanted me to add figure numbers throughout the text even though I will have to remove these (along with the figures) before submitting the document electronically.
Adding the figure numbers proved more time-consuming than difficult, although quite a few works get discussed in different ways in different places and therefore ought to have the figure numbers added repeatedly.
There are some annoying translation issues, though, and they get increasingly annoying the more dictionaries I consult.
Nezval, for instance, writes: "Tak, pozorujeme-li průběh dosavadní vývojové křivsky umění Štyrského a Toyen..." Well, I understand that he wants us to consider the development and evolution of Štyrský and Toyen's art, but what on earth does he mean by "křivsky"? The word apparently bears some connotation of curved or bent, but it is not showing up in dictionaries in this form. I looked at the text several times and assured myself that I did not mistype it.
I have just re-examined the Štyrský text that was plaguing me, however, and find that due to the illegible font, I had managed to misread at least a couple of the words, so perhaps now I can plunge back into the dictionary. I have often thought that whoever chose the font for Každý z nás stopuje svoji ropuchu ought to be drawn and quartered. I don't know why the book couldn't have been done in a nice legible modernist font.

Things Take a Turn for the Better

2008-11-10T10:01:00.001+01:00

My advisor reveals that she is pleased with the newer, slimmer dissertation and that it can go to the rest of the committee once a few small things (probably some rough translations and typos) have been fixed).
We can now proceed to determine a defense date.
After spending all day working on presentations for spring classes, I might take a little break and wander about and think about fiction or something like that.
And Orion, who finagled his way into not being medicated quite as long as the vet wanted (I hope this will not result in a relapse, but his symptoms went away around Tuesday), has made clear that he no longer hates my guts but really would like to be petted and get back to being on good terms and have his ears kissed. I'm relieved he doesn't believe in holding grudges for extended periods of time like the late Penelope.

On Correspondence

2008-11-09T00:20:00.004+01:00

My friend Geoff, whom I've known for what I realize is a surprisingly long time, mostly writes about politics and things relating to the Spanish-speaking parts of the globe. In fact, he and his wife Susana have gone so far as to relocate to Spain, although at the moment they're back in New York.
The other day, Geoff was reminiscing about the days before we were quite so internet-oriented, when we used to send letters on actual paper in real envelopes through the mail. I had taken up the art of letter-writing at about the age of thirteen and had combined it with the art of the decorated envelope (sometimes stationery as well), and was still pursuing it fairly diligently by the time Geoff and I met.
Geoff recalls our correspondence and the decorated envelopes with due nostalgia. In fact, I think Geoff was one of the last people to whom I regularly sent my decorated envelopes, because I knew he appreciated them (and sometimes reciprocated with sketches on his own envelopes) and I was reluctant to give up the visual element of my correspondence for the purely text-based. But eventually our postal correspondence lapsed.
Had I any of my special envelopes handy, I'd scan one for illustration, but I think they are all in a box in my parents' shed (I didn't initially envision being away from the Bay Area for more than a couple of years and the acquisition of an MA). Most of them were done in collage and, I think the recipients will generally agree, were rather peculiar as a rule. I could make a new one, given that I have some suitable materials to hand (a Pottery Barn catalog arrived just the other day, despite the fact that I don't actually shop there). But then who would I send it to? Who would I choose to surprise?
I'm not sure who. Everyone I once sent them to, and it was a reasonable number of people, now keeps in touch with me via holiday cards and/or infrequent emails. They have spouses, children, pets, jobs, and the like occupying their thoughts. Some of them, like Geoff, live in foreign countries now, which makes for some caution about non-standard packaging.
It is true that my friend Megan keeps in touch with certain of her friends through exchange of physical letters and bits of stuff that almost make my old envelopes look like hasty productions; the wall of her bedroom in Kutná Hora was well decorated with mail of this sort. I gather, then, that there are indeed people--in their twenties!--who do not care to lead an entirely digital life, and I think this is a fine thing. But Megan and I do not habitually write to each other; we just make sure to see one another when in the same part of the world.
Actually, when I think about it, there are not all that many people in my life who engage in real correspondence of either the paper or the electronic variety. Nobody at all sends me paper letters. It's all email.
Some people send out a couple of long emails a year, or when something exciting is going on in their lives like (latest example) buying a house in Mexico. People in my department, of course, frequently email me about this or that in a relatively personal way, and this sometimes provides some interesting reading, but it is not what I would normally term real correspondence. Most of them do, after all, see me fairly often and so our emails tend not to be very discursive. When I think about it, there are really only a few people who exchange email with me that can be regarded as an ongoing conversation. Now, it is true that in part I am no longer very good at carrying on a correspondence with people when this involves doing a lot of catch-up on what has happened in my life, and this has probably dissuaded some of my friends from bothering. I try to do my big catch-up over the holidays, which renders it less individual. And for that matter I take the view that the blog ought to mean I shouldn't have to laboriously explain what I'm doing--if people want to know, they can come right here and get the public side of it and not have to ask things like "Have you finished your dissertation yet?" or "Are you still living in Prague?" But, of course, some people are convinced that "blogs are self-indulgent drivel" or that they can catch a virus by visiting a blog. Um, fine. Be that way.
In any case, while I rather miss the excitement of thinking there might be something delightful in the mailbox, with or without foreign postage, email and blog comments have the advantage that an entire multi-part conversation can occur on a topic in the course of a day or two. I am glad that at least a few people partake of this sort of entertainment with me.

Architecture, Film, Posters, and More!

2008-11-08T15:46:00.004+01:00

Getting back to the more academic side of things, now that Mr. English Spot has recovered from his sniffles (though still has to be medicated, causing him to look at me with great loathing and struggle wildly as I attempt to get the syringe near his mouth)...
Er, yes. Academic sorts of things. Intellectual matters. All that.
Well, my advisor looked cheerful when I ran across her on Wednesday and claimed that since the election had been a certainty, she had been reading my dissertation rather than watching the returns. I was impressed at her managing to pull herself away from counting up electoral college votes to think about Toyen, surrealism, and interwar Czech sex-reformism.
And I wrote up a proposal for a conference paper.
And I am busily preparing next semester's courses, as despite my strenuous efforts over the summer, they weren't actually finished up. This was partly, but only partly, because 1) the syllabus I was basing my Realism & Impressionism syllabus on has to be altered significantly because everyone tells me that undergrads hate the textbook it used, so I'm switching textbooks and adding lots of short primary texts that have given me the chance to learn how entertainingly Stendhal wrote about the Salon of 1824 (I was sitting at my library carrel going over it and thought truly, I had no idea of Stendhal's gift for comedy; he trashes Classicism right and left); and 2) my syllabus for the Czech Modernism class has to be properly tailored to it being a seminar that focuses on teaching upper-div majors how to write a research paper. Um, yes, I will be placing every Czech modernist text the library owns on Reserve for the whole of next semester! And (sigh) a gigantic part of my personal library, weighing no doubt several hundred pounds. On the one hand, I plan to give the students whatever Czech scans I have created for my own use, to keep them from wreaking too much damage on the spines, but even with the help of our diligent interim VR director and her minions, only a certain amount can be scanned. And besides, they're supposed to (all seven of them) learn to research so I don't want to spoon-feed them. (But I can't expect them to perform research miracles either. I'll be lucky if any of them can read French or German, let alone Czech.)
Well, before I betake myself off to deal with the likes of laundry and then settle down to slave over the syllabi and presentations some more, I will direct my readers' attention to my British colleague Owen Hatherley's blog Sit Down, Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, which deals with modernist (and sometimes postmodernist) architecture, film, design, posters, and other excitements of that sort.

Election Day Arrives

2008-11-04T10:28:00.000+01:00

My neighborhood, as far as I can tell, is pretty solidly Obama territory. At least, going by signage. But one of the local landmarks of late has been this duplex on N. Highland. The large McCain sign on the one side is balanced by an army of smaller Obama signs.
I had initially assumed there was a bitter fight going on there, but one day I heard that the two neighbors actually get along well outside the political arena. The Obama half happened in to Tazza d'Oro one day and told my friends Lawrence and Alexis (who know everyone) that Obama signs simply keep showing up in his side of the yard and that they should feel free to take one or two for themselves. The McCain neighbor, meanwhile, is said to take in his sign at night to prevent it from being stolen. Well, it is a pretty stunning sign whether or not you agree with it.
I went to my polling place as soon as I could get myself out of the house. I was a little nervous given that I had somehow been registered as a Republican. It gave me that feeling that some dire thing might happen. Whether because of my bizarre alleged affiliation or for some other reason (I had not voted at this precinct before), the pollworkers wanted plenty of ID, and were finally satisfied with my California driver's license. I had brought a mountain of ID just in case.
All my past votes had been cast on paper, however. I was alarmed to see I would be voting on a computer screen. Visions of voter fraud went through my head, especially since I couldn't see any sign which company had manufactured the machine. Still, I succeeded in casting my vote, and proceeded on to Tazza d'Oro for some coffee. A steady stream of voters and election workers are coming through, emblazoned with more different Obama pins than I had previously seen anywhere. Perhaps my old friend Dr. Zaius is right about the course of the McCain-Palin campaign. And for that matter about the Bush presidency. I thought, however, that I had been too busy cutting my dissertation to get to any Halloween parties. I guess I attended one in my astral body over at the Zaius-Gregarious campaign headquarters. If you look closely, there I am in one of the photos. Not one of my better moments but I guess Dr. Zaius intuited that the costume in question is much like what I wore on my fifth birthday (hint: standing there next to Kermit the Frog).

On the home front, life revolves around medicating an angry rabbit. After a morning of chasing Orion round and round the couch (he won), I gave up and incarcerated both rabbits. Ms. Spots has taken the whole thing abnormally well, although this morning she did let me know she thought I had taken this far enough. But then, she would happily take Orion's medicine for him. Orion still wants no part of it but recognizes that he has been bested. He's furious but submissive. I have to say that while submissive is convenient, I don't really like seeing him get that way. It isn't exactly natural to him.
The heavily trimmed dissertation has been turned in. We will see whether my advisor thinks it has been trimmed and revised enough to go on to the rest of the committee. I can only hope so. I wasn't able to cut as much as she wanted, but I did get rid of over a hundred pages. My stamina for this kind of thing is about gone for now and I really need to turn to other projects, like finishing next semester's courses and putting together job applications.

Orion Revisits the Vet

2008-10-31T21:18:00.000+01:00

Orion, accompanied by Ms. Spots, visited the vet a couple of weeks ago after a brief and uncharacteristic lack of desire for breakfast. Since his appetite had returned by the time we went, both rabbits mainly had their toenails trimmed and their ears cleaned.
Unfortunately, this week Orion has come down with a new indisposition: a runny nose that causes sniffling and sneezing. His behavior has been pretty normal, so I hoped it would pass in a couple of days, but it wasn't going away and he was beginning to want unusual amounts of petting, so today he went back to the vet.
We came away with a big bottle of medicine, which he will be taking twice a day for the next two weeks. I was hoping that I could just mix the stuff with baby food and expect him to lap it up the way George used to, and for that matter the way Ms. Spots usually does, but he sniffed it suspiciously and decided it was not at all his kind of treat. I then had to try syringe feeding him. While I was able to catch him (a sign in itself that he is not feeling so great), he wanted no part of having things stuck in his mouth, and really I have no skill at syringe-feeding rabbits single-handed anyway. Most of whatever got into his mouth probably got there because it dripped onto his paws and he licked his paws after the ordeal.
I sniffed the mixture and had to admit that even to the poor-quality human nose, it smelled medicinal. Ms. Spots thinks the stuff smells interesting, but she has a more adventurous palate than Orion.
At most I was able to get half the evening's dose into the protesting patient. He is now reclining under a wicker chair with his paramour, who licked his face to express her support. She doesn't lick him all that much as a rule, but she is doing pretty well at being Dr. Spots today.
I'm not sure how we'll get through twice-a-day dosing of the patient considering that he now regards me with considerable suspicion and I've only really successfully syringe-fed rabbits with the help of a second person.

First Snow of the Season

2008-10-29T22:18:00.000+01:00

It snowed much of the day but alas I didn't photograph it.
I was, instead:
1) cutting dissertation
2) meeting with student about exam
3) cutting more dissertation
4) playing unusually loud fast music in gamelan (almost as if we were in a Balinese group, but with a completely different sound), which we are thinking of mating to electric guitar with heavy distortion just for fun
5) cutting more dissertation
6) realizing that tomorrow's Powerpoint presentation is one of those I didn't actually finish over the summer and has to be created almost from scratch
7) petting neglected lapines (Orion has been sneezing, may have to go the vet)
8) trawling through Library of Congress's web site looking for late-19th-century wood engravings of labor, strikes, immigration, and related topics.

Election Oddities

2008-10-28T22:28:00.000+01:00

I will be turning in the drastically shortened (?) version of my dissertation next Monday, in time for my advisor to either (we speculated) soak it in blood or in champagne. We would prefer the latter. I really don't want to learn that she has committed hari-kiri or a related act over the election returns.
Meanwhile, my new Voter ID card has arrived; I was persuaded to register in Pennsylvania on the grounds that it is a swing state. So far so good, but why does it say I am a Republican? This bit of misidentification could cause someone to attack me at my local polling place. I did not, on my registration, claim to be any such thing, although I did consider saying I was Independent.

Mischief Over at Think Denk

2008-10-25T17:29:00.001+02:00

Before I stop laughing, I must direct Obama-supporting, musically inclined readers to "An Interview with Sarah Palin." I hadn't previously realized how effectively musicology and political satire could be combined.
You may never think of Beethoven (or Schenkerian analysis) in the same way again.
My regards to Dirk for bringing this to my attention.
Dipping into other posts on the same blog suggests I could get lost there for awhile, assuming I don't fall on the floor with evil mirth. For example:

Well, I had just finished practicing the twelve Liszt Transcendental Etudes, twelve times, and my parents and I had an emotional conference about the comet while my father prepared a snack of tortillas and Cheez Whiz.

(This last sentence is an example of “local color” which I learned about at Las Cruces High School, from my charmingly insane English teacher. From this teacher I learned to write one-page essays about Kafka, asserting in their first paragraph that Gregor Samsa is an “unholy trinity of Christ, bug, and man,” and concluding “in conclusion, I have shown that Gregor Samsa is an unholy trinity of Christ, bug, and man.” My eloquence leaves me without words.)

Had to get in that Czech reference there, after all. (Yes, I know Kafka wrote in German, but he was from Prague and bilingual.)
Exam grading is now officially over. Some exams were better than expected, some were worse. Some of my students had better ask me about study skills and how to prevent going blank during exams when they clearly know most of the answers. (Do I know the answer to the latter problem? No, but I provide free unlicensed psychotherapy to the chosen few.)

It's Necessary to Go Dancing

2008-10-23T12:49:00.000+02:00

The Modern exams did improve after I got out of the definitions sections, I am glad to say. This is mildly baffling but a relief.
One cannot, however, be academic more than about ten hours a day. (I think I managed about eight today, with letup only to take the bus to school around 1:00. I did discover that if you hit upon the right terms, Library of Congress not surprisingly has lots of late-nineteenth-century imagery of conflict with Native Americans.) It is important to go dancing. And indeed, as one of my colleagues said in describing last week's Lindy Hop adventures, it might wipe you out for the whole weekend but all the same it puts you in a good mood for several days.

Modernism is Hard

2008-10-19T13:27:00.000+02:00

Having finally gotten through the American Art exams--which were very satisfactory other than that many students have trouble getting the ID portions--I turned my attention to the Modern exams.
While I'm sure that things will improve, thus far (I have graded the term definition section) I am rather disturbed.
I think almost everyone has been able to define Pointillism reasonably well, but after that it can be quite the train wreck. I am reminded that last time I taught Intro to Modern, students also tended to think Orientalism mean Japonisme. It is true I talk more about Japanese influence on western art, but considering that Orientalism is such a big topic in other disciplines, you would think people would have heard about it there. Oh well, I will have to stress the difference next time I teach the class.
And I'm unsure why "non-objective" art is a stumbling block for almost everyone, because I know that I specified how it is different from "abstraction" (which has some sort of subject matter out there in the world, whether it is an apple or St. George). I'm especially unsure why several people seem to think it simply hasn't got a focus, or a technique, or a meaning. Still, maybe it's just hard to get used to the idea that a work can be "about" color or form or feeling, although 2008 seems a little late to find this new and surprising since non-objective art is all over the place.
Still, while many people gave reasonable definitions for most terms, I am surprised by some of what I'm reading. A few of the more peculiar definitions proffered by my students this semester are:
AVANT-GARDE: upper crust society
FAUVISM: 'false' movement; artwork focusing on the surreal.
SUPREMATISM: focusing on avant-garde/high society
MANIFESTO: The story and philosophies of a person (or "artificially decorating on the natural image")
PRIMITIVISM: Characterized by indistinct brushstrokes
PLEIN-AIRE PAINTING: a style of painting that uses everyday subject matter
ORIENTALISM: Oath of the Horatii (or, as another person suggests, "Orientation of the picture/painting, lay out)
THE ACADEMY: Liberal art
I had been under the impression that more people understood the material better. Were these people not listening at all? Did they not read the textbook at all? (Where do some of these definitions come from, outer space?) Is it that the class begins at dinner-time? Are people malnourished during class?
I do think that Intro to Modern is intrinsically harder to get a grip on for most people. American Art is, for most of its history, about recognizable subjects. Most people quickly recognize portraits of George Washington, and a significant amount of American art up to 1910 or so deals with national themes. Modernism, on the other hand, involves a bewildering cavalcade of artists and movements, most of whom do their best to make the subject matter a bit baffling.
Ah well. I believe I will do a few other things before returning to the exams.

The General Unfairness of Things

2008-10-13T17:14:00.001+02:00

Overheard on the WYEP's "Discumentary" show: "The album... went on to sell a modest 60,000 copies."
Now if that had been a book, it would be a bestseller, or at least well on the way. Print runs of 2500-3000 copies were common for literary fiction last I checked and usually not all of those copies sell.

Nostalgic Odors

2008-10-11T15:07:00.000+02:00

The artist Luis Camnitzer, in giving the keynote address at this weekend's symposium "Storytelling: Playful Interactions and Spaces of Imagination in Contemporary Visual Culture, happened to refer to a 1990s study that asked which odors provoke nostalgia.
He observed that, according to the study, Americans born in the 1930s and 1940s reported that such scents as those of roses, baking bread, and sea air prompted nostalgia, whereas for Americans born in the 1960s, odors of hairspray, nail polish, burnt rubber, and dirty socks prompt nostalgia instead. Camnitzer, who grew up in Uruguay, pointed out that people from outside the US experience nostalgia in association with other odors, and that for him these include those of freshly starched sheets and of meats roasted on the street by masons at work on local buildings.
While numerous aspects of Camnitzer's talk interested me, my imagination was particularly seized by this brief detour onto nostalgia-producing scents. I immediately had to think about what sort of odors provoke my own nostalgia.
I am relieved to say that apart from nail polish, none of the odors cited by the 1960s cohort are even slightly nostalgic for me. I admit that the scent of nail polish does instantly take me back to the age of 7, when I requested and somewhat to my surprise received nail polish for Christmas. But I doubt I would find this unpleasant odor agreeably nostalgic if I had used nail polish regularly in the intervening years. My use of nail polish after the age of 7 was pretty infrequent until I began graduate school, which took me to parts of the country warm enough to make me take off my socks during the summer. I think there has also been a fashion for polished toenails in that time, as I don't remember very many people wearing nail polish when I lived in Southern California and on the rare occasions that I wore nail polish, it was on my fingernails. (But those of us who play piano and most stringed instruments tend to keep our fingernails short and not wear nail polish on them.)
The other nostalgic odors I came up with were the likes of lilac blossoms, marigolds, honeysuckle, rain, fresh dirt, sawdust, tempera paint, and grass clippings. There are also a few odors that take me into the past without being at all pleasantly nostalgic, like that of the inside of an old coffee thermos (yuck) and certain baby shampoos (gross).
I've just thought of another nostalgic odor that isn't normally considered pleasant: the smell of brown coal. It takes me right back to Czechoslovakia before and somewhat after the Velvet Revolution. For me, this is pleasant; for Czechs, I imagine it is usually not.

Fortuna Speaks

2008-10-09T15:18:00.000+02:00

In my lunchtime fortune cookie: "Avoid compulsively making things worse."
This should clearly be my guiding precept this week in all matters. We will see how it can be applied to journal articles and dissertation revisions.

Mid-Semester Life Goes On

2008-10-07T14:07:00.000+02:00

While in some respects this is not proving to be one of my better weeks, I suppose everything will turn out all right in the end on all fronts. At least one of the journal articles is bound to be finished and sent off, for instance. And I will probably not make a complete mess of the three pieces the gamelan is performing next week for potential donors.
I can also contemplate the positive aspects of teaching. I have begun to grade the American Art midterms and thus far (5 down, about 35 to go, so there could be a rude shock later down the line) everyone has done a very good job. The exams range from some sort of B to the definite A. They are really impressing me with the attention paid to (as requested) form, content, and context, and often reveal surprisingly good writing under pressure. I can see that I will need to get a little further into how today we use the term "beauty" differently and more loosely than it was used 200 years ago, so that the sublime could not also be beautiful even if today we would regard it thus, but I can hardly complain that students might not quite get this distinction on first acquaintance. I am very happy with what I'm reading.
Both classes, I think, are working hard and doing their best to learn the material and understand the larger concepts. So I can't complain about them at all yet, only about myself.

The Mid-Semester Is Upon Us

2008-10-04T13:20:00.000+02:00

Fall has fallen upon us. We're no longer having the early-fall combination of warm days and cool nights; in the last two or three days the temperature has plunged. It's that Pittsburgh moment of switching from sleeveless garments and the occasional T-shirt to long-sleeved shirts, sweaters, and at times a down jacket.
I like fall, but I don't do well with this kind of sudden shift. Time to take plenty of vitamins and sleep a lot.
The change of season, however, coincides with a need to step up the energy on nearly everything. I've got two journal articles due October 15 (one a revision, one a requested submission), a conference paper proposal to think through, 40 essay-midterms to grade, two courses to finish putting together for next semester (the third, fortunately, is pretty much already done since it is just an update)... and I hear hints from my advisor that large amounts of the dissertation should be cut and saved for a book project.
Well, this should make clear why I decided I couldn't quite make it to this weekend's Lindy Hop workshop, which I was looking forward to after my a brief intro to the dance a couple of weeks ago. I feel aggrieved, as once I get out onto the dance floor, I don't want to stop. Evidently I am destined (for the foreseeable future) simply to work on my West Coast Swing skills, although I did get an invitation from one fairly advanced Lindy dancer to embark on practice sessions.
There is never enough time to do everything. But at least the new journal article is starting to look like something other than a mass of dissertation fragments.

Economic Meltdown?

2008-10-01T09:09:00.000+02:00

Over in academia we, too are watching the stock market follow everything else and go into a nosedive. But perhaps all is not lost. Kristen points us to one of her staple cartoon strips and its... um... sort of optimistic view of the situation. If this link doesn't seem to perform correctly, it's for the cartoon of 9/29/08.

Say What? The Perils of Dress

2008-09-30T19:11:00.002+02:00

Colleague A: I love your tights.
Colleague B: Those are great tights. They're very baroque.
Colleague C: Those are very striking tights. Of course, you young people can wear that kind of thing.
Self: I will stand behind the lectern during the entire class in order not to distract students with my tights.

Stranger on the street: "Your outfit is absolutely beautiful!"
Self: Thanks nice stranger.
Stranger on the street continues: "You look just like Snow White!"
Self, internally: WTF?! will dress cause students to regress to childhood during review for midterm?

Weekend Entertainments

2008-09-29T11:19:00.001+02:00

I did not manage to get myself out dancing more than twice over the weekend (one has to ease back into vigorous activity, evidently), but I did initiate two other grad students into the mysteries of West Coast Swing. They both enjoyed themselves and both had reason to agree, as one of them remarked several times, that people in Pittsburgh are "really friendly." I was definitely impressed with the way so many people went out of their way to welcome my friends and help them learn the steps. People have been nice to me, too, but as I'm less of a complete beginner, it wasn't quite as striking.
I spent the rest of the weekend working on my Czech Modernism syllabus and an article on gender and the body in First Republic Czechoslovakia (due in a couple of weeks), and finishing the first draft of a large and entirely unacademic project that has been entertaining me for the past few months.
And, I might add, I finished reading Aldous Huxley's impertinent 1920s classic, Antic Hay. I had no idea when I began it that it would be so full of art and architectural discussion, or so full of entertaining quotable lines. Surely I must be able to find a way to quote one of the lines about how one can no longer dream in 1922 (because it suggests Freud) into my dissertation. And then (My Sibling will appreciate this) there's the line where one character asserts that "Most women are like dachshunds." I am feeling reluctant to return the book on the grounds that I need to extract all the most amusing quotes for future use. I tried to find out when this tale appeared in Czech, but the NKP server seems to be down just now. The British were going into shock over it in 1923 and I assume it was widely translated. (Well, Worldcat reminds me that it's often hard to know just how a book's title is translated, although I can tell that Point Counterpoint, Brave New World, and Doors of Perception have appeared in Czech.)

Pittsburgh Dances

2008-09-26T18:16:00.000+02:00

Despite having failed to go dancing in nearly the whole time I've lived in Pittsburgh (several years even if interrupted by life in Prague), I've now managed to get myself out and dancing several times here, and I can report that the dancing is excellent.
Just check out www.pghdance.com and see what a fine schedule there is pretty much every week. And I hasten to say that there's much more going on than is just on their calendar, but I'm not sure I can manage to go dancing more than 3-4 times a week. So far I've managed twice a week; maybe this weekend will lead me into the 3-4 time range.
There's no need to bring a partner, or to have ever done this before. Just show up in time for class and all will be well.

What Would Freud Say?

2008-09-24T22:35:00.001+02:00

People have all sorts of different mild anxiety dreams. Some of them fall into standard categories--I've found that lots of people have dreams about being very late to work because there are lots of detours and roadblocks on the way, and lots of people dream about going back to an old school and having to retake some subject but forgetting to sign up for it or to attend class.
I wonder, however, whether I have recently added new categories. I have now dreamt:
a) that suddenly it is time to graduate and I didn't order my cap and gown sufficiently in advance, and that it's baffling because I was sure we hadn't gotten to the middle of the fall semester yet (which is, in fact, true);
b) that I have entirely run out of Archelaus cards and don't know how to deal with this situation. It's true my supply is a little low after giving two boxes as gifts recently, but I really don't see the need to have dreams in which this is a dire problem when all I need to do is order more.
We won't even try to make sense of my apparently having been visited by an incubus recently. All I can say about that is that if my friends wish to appear in my dreams, I would prefer that they not turn into bizarre hags all of a sudden. That really spoils everything, after all.

And Sometimes Everything Is Awful

2008-09-22T11:41:00.001+02:00

I'm not sure what to say. I've just learned that the wife of a new colleague over in the History department was run over by a schoolbus on Saturday after dropping off her daughter at daycare.
I had only met Eva once, at the new faculty reception, but I had enjoyed talking with her and was looking forward to getting to know her better. Her husband Arpad works on recent Hungarian cultural history and they had both just moved here from Germany.
To make it all worse, the bus was full of kids. I'm not sure how the bus driver missed seeing Eva in the crosswalk, but I can't remember just what that intersection is like.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Test Your Color Skills!

2008-09-21T21:30:00.001+02:00

You can test your ability to discern slight color gradations here. There's no time limit, you just drag and drop the blocks in each row until you think they're in the correct order.
I guess some people take a long time worrying over this. It probably does improve your score to obsess a little about it before clicking on "score test," but I confess I put my set together pretty quickly and soon got tired of wondering whether there were any slightly misplaced squares. My result:

Based on your information, below is how your score compares to those of others with similar demographic information.

* Your score: 11
* Gender: Female
* Age range: 40-49
* Best score for your gender and age range: 0
* Highest score for your gender and age range: 1421

So even rushing through it in poor lighting conditions, I didn't do too badly. Maybe you'll do better and get a 0.
My errors were all in the blue and green range, which either suggests I don't handle those colors as well or that I was lazier correcting those sections. I guess I should take it again and see if the results are similar...

Czech Resources Online

2008-09-19T11:36:00.003+02:00

Some unexpected resources are beginning to turn up here and there online for Czech art and cultural history.
Google Books has copies of several volumes of the important art journal Volné směry, published by the Mánes Association, although they are erroneously catalogued as different editions of one book. It looks as though volumes 1 (1897), 2 (1898), 4 (1900), 9 (1905), 10 (1906), and 12 (1908) are actually viewable and downloadable PDF files. Several other years are listed as digitized but for some reason not actually available, perhaps due to confusion about these being editions of a book rather than unique volumes of a periodical.
The New York Public Library has digitized holdings of the related cultural and design magazines Žijeme and Magazin dp. These are done as individual JPGs, which makes them easy to put in PowerPoint but not as easy to read through.
I'm somewhat baffled as to just how one easily gets a sense of what digital resources the NYPL has without either having a specific target in mind or else leafing through hundreds and hundreds of images. Searching on "Czech" tells me that there are 2577 images, which is a fine thing, but I really don't want to go through 215 pages of thumbnails filled with things like views of Humpolec. There is, for example, a digitized copy of Nezval's Pantomima with cover by Štyrský, and Biebl's S lodí jež dováží čaj a kávu with cover by Teige. Then there's also the cover of the third issue of the Erotická revue, but apparently only one of the illustrations, a hermaphroditic drawing by Toyen (admittedly one of the better choices artistically speaking, but not exactly representative of the contents). Unlike some people, my patience for going through endless pages of images just to see what's there is rather limited. We'll just be glad for all those digitization projects out there and also for people who sift through them and point out more good stuff than I will ever do here.

Note: Prodded by an Esteemed Reader, I have put in lots of links and also discovered that the NYPL has digitized ReD (Revue Devětsil)--here's volume 2.

When You Match Your Living Room...

2008-09-17T08:21:00.000+02:00

...psychosis is probably on the way.

Now What?

2008-09-16T17:44:00.001+02:00

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): What you're about to leave behind is helpful but a bit dull; it's fortifying but old-fashioned; comforting but homely. What you're headed toward, on the other hand, is invigorating, through slightly disruptive; it's futuristic and amusingly confusing; interesting but also a real test of your flexibility. The transition may happen faster than you thought it would. Congratulations in advance on being a good-natured transformer.

And what am I leaving behind this time, pray tell? Inquiring minds want to know. Something predictable like grad school, or something more surprising? Is it happening right now or just in the general near future?

A Little Revamping

2008-09-14T17:39:00.000+02:00

It has been awhile since I updated the links on the right-hand side of the blog, and during that time some of the blogs have gone away and others have ceased to be active, although they're still worth looking at.
And, since I happened to run across a blog by one of my local friends this afternoon, that seemed like a sign that it might be time to do a little revision. I met Lawrence and his family some months back when we were sitting at neighboring cafe tables and one of the girls said something particularly funny that brought us all into conversation. Almost everyone I know in Pittsburgh is someone I met through school, so getting to know a few other people lately has been a nice change of pace. Furthermore, I didn't know any other writers here until I met Lawrence. While I wouldn't say I suffer when deprived of the company of serious writers, exchanging a few words with a compatible writer (even if we've never read each other's work) gives me the sense of quenching a thirst I had forgotten I had. With all that in mind, then, I recommend his intermittent but poetic and often profound blog, Moon on the Fifteenth Day.
But be sure to check out the other blogs, too. There's a lot of beautiful, wonderful, strange, and thought-provoking material there. The section of blogs by friends provides links to blogs with very individual perspectives. Some of the blogs in other sections are also by people I consider friends, but are ... oh, I don't know, more thematic? less opinionated? I'm not sure how to categorize the intuitive split here. Never mind, they're all interesting.

We Italicize in Chicago Style, DON'T WE?

2008-09-12T20:23:00.000+02:00

The dissertation, in more or less finished form, is now in my advisor's hands. I am now returning my attention to its lesser accompaniments, namely the bibliography and the appendixes.
As I suppose is the case at most schools, we are supposed to do everything in a special university-sanctioned format. Whether dissertations are in that format is not of great concern to dissertation committees so long as the said dissertations are legible and have citations and chapters and all that sort of thing, but once the committee signs off (after the defense), then it all has to be shoehorned into the template if it was not already template-ized.
Overall, I think the idea of a template is quite helpful. But life could hardly be so simple as to offer smooth template-ization. The template is in Microsoft Word, meaning that at some level it is supposed one will write in Word. Of course, not all of us choose to write in Word. Generally speaking, pretty much any word-processing program's output can be converted to a Word document when necessary.
I was not too happy, therefore, when I copied my bibliography into the template and found that applying the "Bibliography entry" style to it had to be done in pieces (apparently it was too long a bibliography for Word to tolerate doing the style all in one piece), and then, much worse, that the "Bibliography entry" style turned all my italics into Roman. The thought of manually re-italicizing 50 pages worth of bibliographic entries really does not appeal to me, but I suppose it must be done.
The grad student's work is unending.

Here's Looking at You, Squid!

2008-09-09T21:44:00.000+02:00

This year I have (drumroll) an office. Shared, but nonetheless mine. And so my advisor said she would meet me at my office at 6:00, as clearly some obeisance had to be made to my exciting new (even if temporary) status.
In the meantime I had to go locate a scissors with which to undo a highly thrilling package that had just arrived from Brno. To be specific, over the summer Jesse kindly bought and mailed me a copy of the Štyrský exhibition catalog and it had finally arrived. It is probably the most expensive book I have yet bought, so I'm relieved it got here in one piece.
Having opened the package off in the TA Office, I was returning to my new lair, to be greeted by a voice whining "Professor, I don't know what to do my paper on, can you tell me what to write my paper on?"
While today I did get the first student inquiries about papers, none of them were in that special whine that only the satirically minded can properly muster. It was, of course, my advisor.
I brought forth the Štyrský catalog and brandished it, saying "You will write your paper on Štyrský's painting Squid Man!
Having taken care of all that, we went out to dinner.

6th Anniversary

2008-09-08T22:20:00.000+02:00

No, Ms. Spots and Orion have not been an item for six years yet, but today it is six years since Her Spottedness was adopted from the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society. At that time she was a half-grown little critter, but her charms were already manifestly evident. She was friendly, lively, and immediately fell in love with the unforgettable George, never mind that he was starting to have considerable trouble hopping around.
While Calypso Spots has always been a mischievous character, she no longer gets into much trouble and is best described as a Glutton for Petting. She brings those who know her much happiness, other than when stealing Orion's evening treat, and it is very much to be wished that she will be with us for at least another six delightful years. That is her Floppy-Earedness over to the left, reaching out to her besotted mate, Orion the English Spot.

"Mardi Gras in Hawaii"?

2008-09-07T23:44:00.001+02:00

Now that the semester has begun, it's grad student party season--that is, before everyone gets too bogged down to think of such things. Our first large-scale event (there have already been new-student-welcomes, comps-completion-celebrations, and such) was a celebration of Travis's 29th birthday. Since Travis has a very fine grasp of the truly campy, he chose to go with the theme of "Mardi Gras in Hawaii" and never mind that Lent is not in September or anywhere near. Shalmit offered her apartment as a staging ground, and it was an ideal space for swarms of us, some of whom practiced hula dancing in a circle. Travis and Shalmit can be seen in full costume to the left.
Travis made sure that there were a great many fine accoutrements associated with New Orleans or Hawaii, including beads and leis. I chose a string of glittery purple beads (these were nothing compared to the amazing giant mirror-ball beads that Brianne brought from New Orleans), and Aaron, one of the new grads, chose to be decked out in a couple of leis. Since these photos were taken at the start of the evening, before anyone had consumed any of the punch (note bizarre blue liquid in my glass), perhaps it should be pointed out that Aaron and I have already been to enough events together to pose in a friendly fashion. I like to think that I am partly responsible for his choice of Pittsburgh, as I happened to talk to one of his undergrad professors during CAA (she is another surrealist specialist) and she asked whether I thought he should accept our offer. I said his prospective advisor would work him hard but ensure that he did well. Or something like that. I recommended our program, anyhow.
It might be noted that my lime-green shirt (one of the more tropical items I have in Pittsburgh considering that I left my pseudo-Hawaiian shirt in California after wearing it to another recent Hawaiian-themed party) does seem to make me look much larger than is in fact the case. Had the weather not turned just a tiny bit chilly, I would have stuck to my fine sleeveless bug-print gown. It's not every party that you can wear a dress with pictures of insects all over it to.
And I might also note that Travis received a set of Archelaus cards for his birthday and has already used three of them!

And What Breed IS Your Rabbit?

2008-08-30T19:15:00.001+02:00

The Pittsburgh House Rabbit Club's latest meeting addressed the matter of America's rabbit breeds. Of course, generally speaking we have adopted rabbits who needed homes, but that doesn't mean we are uninterested in their physical characteristics.
I didn't actually take notes, but if memory serves me, there are something like 40 or 60 breeds recognized in the United States, which doesn't take into account the numerous breeds found only in other lands. I learned that while Orion is unquestionably an English Spot, he is definitely not a show rabbit (not that this was any surprise). Only 50% of a litter has the "correct" markings; 25% is solid-colored and Orion is one of the 25% that have something vaguely approximating the standard markings. Orion has the black ears and black patches around his eyes, he sort of has the black nose but in a lopsided manner, his cheek spots are merged with his eye patches, and let's not try to specify what happened to the differentiation between the black stripe down the back and the side spots. If he weren't so fat, he would have the correct arched, long-limbed body type (he had it once upon a time).
Ms. Spots is allegedly a French Lop, but I have always had doubts about this, as she has never weighed more than 8 pounds, so perhaps she is actually a Mini Lop or some sort of mixture. She has much bigger feet than Orion and always looked as though she would grow to be larger than she actually did.
There are photos of the various breeds at the ARBA website.
While at the meeting, I learned that Bingo has really and permanently been adopted. He was fostered by a shelter worker who decided that she couldn't possibly give him up, and he now lives with other rabbits, birds, and I don't know what all. I gather he has exactly the kind of high-stimulus, high-petting life he needs and deserves. While I regret not getting to have him myself, I don't know how I would have added him to my small household.
Less fortunately, Sophia was adopted but returned--after she had bonded with another rabbit in the household. No one is very happy about this, least of all Sophia. It is true she doesn't seem to believe in litterboxes, but other than that she's a lovely rabbit.
Also less fortunately, my car has had to be towed to the shop for the second time in two weeks. The first time, the (local) shop couldn't find anything wrong. We'll see what the (no longer very local) dealership says. The obliging towtruck operator, who did his best both times around, now wonders if the fuel pump needs to be replaced.

The Annoying and the Exciting

2008-08-28T09:52:00.000+02:00

The annoying: looking in the closet for something to wear and discovering that not all of the woollens got put into ziplock bags a few months back, meaning that MOTHS have invaded. (Is it worse to have moths or carpet beetles? I am uncertain. I don't think moths have such diverse appetites, but they did seem to be invading the silks as well as the woollens.)
The exciting: finding that quite a few members of the American Art class have overcome technical difficulties to get to their discussion board on Courseweb and are saying pretty intelligent things about a fairly hard reading. This bodes well for today's presentation.

Shocking Negligence

2008-08-27T20:28:00.001+02:00

I admit it, I have not attended properly to the blog of late. My head has been full of writing projects, preparations for teaching, New Faculty Orientation and New Faculty Reception, swing dancing, gamelan, and even German translation practice. The Spotted Pair have been somewhat disappointed at the limited petting, and are doing various things (mostly quite agreeable) to remind me of my duty to my lapine roommates.
New Faculty Orientation was all very well in its way, but necessarily somewhat repetitive for those of us who are only new in our titles. I wasn't sure what to suggest when we had to fill out evaluation forms, but it has since occurred to me that there could have been some attention to things like the mysteries of the Peoplesoft system (something that was implemented while I was in Prague and still have no concept of other than that people keep asking for my "Peoplesoft number" but will accept the number on my ID card instead). There could also have been some brief reference to our health insurance options. Still, I was glad to run into an old friend who's also Visiting this year and even has a book contract (although I would not like to have to turn in a book manuscript pretty much at the same time as the dissertation it was based on), and we brilliantly managed to sit next to a new member of the History dept whose work on Hungarian pop culture relates to both of our interests.
As for the New Faculty Reception, well, that's the kind of thing that either proves to be thoroughly worthwhile or thoroughly dull, depending on who you end up talking to. The setup was excellent--the Chancellor has a house with a very suitable garden, the weather cooperated, and there was very good food and enjoyable baroque guitar music. Fortunately I hit it lucky on the conversation and enjoyed talking further with my acquaintance from History and his wife, and met another Visiting person, this time from English, who had done his undergraduate work at the same place I had, so we immediately began to compare recollections. I am sure it would have been a fine thing to have met a few more people, but at least the four of us had plenty to say and barely managed to eat anything as a result.
I have taught one session of each of my classes, and am optimistic about both of them. The Intro to Modern class is mostly people who claim to know nothing about art, but they did a good job of starting to discuss the formal analyses I had them write. The American Art class has mostly people with more experience taking art history classes, and they are (or some of them) are now in the throes of trying to discuss their reading online. We are having some technical issues, but not impossible ones, as some people have got it all figured out and perhaps they can pass on their expertise to the rest of the class while I try to improve how it works from my end (on Blackboard, known in Pittsburgh as Courseweb).
The gamelan class is distressingly small this semester, but is enthusiastic and includes two of my friends from last year. I suppose it will burgeon in the spring; I gather it always does.
And that is enough for the moment.

Back in Western PA

2008-08-13T21:29:00.002+02:00

The Spotted Pair and I managed to drag ourselves out of bed at 4am yesterday in order to fly back to Pittsburgh. Or I dragged myself out of bed but I'm not sure what they did as they were already awake by then and wondering what dire event was in store.
While I was unhappy when our second flight of the day was delayed, all seemed better once we got to the apartment. The weather was pleasant--neither boiling hot nor like the recent Bay Area weather that caused some people to put on fuzzy gloves or even wool turtlenecks topped with sweatshirts. Actually, it was pretty much ideal summer evening weather, so I went out for a walk. My neighborhood looked positively enchanting in the gloaming, and I saw fireflies!
I can't say I have ever given thought to whether I have a favorite insect, but the thought occurred to me that perhaps the firefly ought to be in the running. Butterflies are often gorgeous, but I'm not sure they can be said to have the magical charm of the common lightning bug.
My stay in California was, in retrospect, an odd mix of things. I got a lot done on certain projects, although not as much as I would have liked. I saw more friends than I expected, given that I had less free time than usual--while both John and Cesar spent significant parts of my visit away on separate European adventures, I did get to see them, my writing group, and several old friends from the NWU. At the end, several parts of my life even combined in an unexpected manner when Cesar took me to the poet Alice Rogoff's birthday party. They're in the same writing group and I know Alice slightly from the NWU (she was becoming active just as I was getting ready to go off to school), but it turned out that a significant number of the guests are close friends of an old friend of mine. I thought I had known Sullivan a respectable length of time, but they've known him since about 1969. Anyhow, it was nice to have a few opportunities to escape my various projects and even my father's medical adventures.
Meanwhile, my birthday draws closer and tomorrow my father is scheduled to get out of rehab, so some celebration ought to be in order.
But I regret to say that I have been asked to do a second rewrite of a journal article written last summer. This is better than having it rejected, but one of the anonymous reviewers seems to want me to shoehorn most of my dissertation into a 10,000-word article, in addition to adding some things that I would have to research separately. I am not sure what to do about this, so I think I should return to putting the final touches on my fall syllabi and presentations, since after all I do commence teaching in a week and a half.

More Coffee?

2008-08-09T09:37:00.000+02:00

I'm not one of the world's champion coffee drinkers. Many of my friends are, but I'm usually content with one or two cups in the morning.
On the other hand, I do find a good cafe to improve my overall productivity, because I tend to thrive on an occasional change of scene. If I work for a few hours at home, for instance, I usually need to go somewhere else if I expect to work for a few more hours. Back when I first returned to school and was taking classes at San Francisco State, I wrote one of my papers in some sort of marathon that involved 1) several hours at the UC Berkeley library; 2) several more hours at a cafe (I believe it was Coquelet, which has been in existence since before I first moved to the East Bay and shows no sign of disappearing these many years later--in fact, it's open 24 hours); and 3) a final frenzy of composition at home sitting on my bed. While one need not drink coffee in most cafes, it is what one does usually get unless a confirmed tea-drinker. (I drink tea more as a change of pace, or herb teas.) Thus, there arises that nagging question of whether I drink too much coffee.
My coffee-obsessed friends have been pleased to note that the medical world is no longer stern about the evils of coffee. Numerous recent studies seem to indicate that unless you really, really drink lots of the stuff, it is probably even good for you. The New York Times recently ran an article claiming to demystify the conflicting claims, though as far as I could tell it was only citing the favorable studies as a corrective to the previous anti-coffeeism.
I am a little skeptical of all this. I'm quite willing to believe that coffee is not bad for humans unless taken in huge doses; after all, people have been drinking coffee for quite some time without there being any discernable terrible effects. I am glad not to have an addiction to the stuff, since I hear unpleasant things from people who try to cut down their caffeine intake, but as addictions go, it is pretty benign, and I am sure coffee is much better for people than the various forms of cola. But given the size of the American coffee industry, I think there are quite a few people with a vested interest in seeing studies that promote the benefits of coffee. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of these studies were funded at least in part by the coffee industry.
Having said all this, I feel obliged to add my voice to the many that protest the Starbuckization of America and the world at large. I do not, in fact, detest Starbuck's; it has brought decent coffee and pleasant places to drink it to many remote parts of North America. If I am driving across country, and don't see a promising local coffee house, I am perfectly happy to visit Starbuck's. I am opposed, however, to the chain's habit of opening new branches right near thriving independents or local chains. In some neighborhoods this doesn't cause a problem--any place that can accommodate three or four cafes in one block obviously isn't endangered by a Starbucks--but in others, it drives the competition out of business. But perhaps this is no longer happening; I gather Starbuck's is closing some stores.
I dislike, however, the way that other cafes feel they have to imitate Starbuck's menu. I don't care where I am, I am going to order a small coffee (unless, like Tazza d'Oro, "small" truly means small and not big), not a "tall," because no matter what it's called, it will be more than I usually drink and I don't want to encourage tallness. And, apart from getting the occasional latte or cafe-au-lait, I am not about to spend my small cache of disposal income on fancy coffee drinks that will just make me fat and broke. I don't know what most of these are and I don't think I want to know. I first heard of "Americano" in Prague, as that seemed to be what I began hearing American tourists order, circa spring 2007. Whatever Americano is, I now hear it constantly in American cafes as well.
In the Berkeley area, total coffee devotees have gone to Peet's for a very long time. The original Peet's locations seem to have kept their extreme-coffee ambiance, which was always a little too coffee-worshipping for me, but which I respected. Mr. Peet has now retired and Peet's has expanded quite a bit. I regret to say that the El Cerrito Peet's is pretty much a clone of Starbuck's, even including being too chilly to sit in for any length of time. (El Cerrito does not have a climate that requires air conditioning more than once or twice every five years, so why must Peet's be so cold?) Still, it is not a bad place in general, especially since Fat Apples, which has memorable coffee and pastries, is more a restaurant than a cafe.
Having rambled on at length about coffee, I think it is time to gather my projects and remove myself from the temptations of the internet.

A Little Dancing

2008-08-07T21:23:00.001+02:00

While much of my life this week revolves around visits to the rehab facility, quite a bit actually relates to writing things other than blogs, and a certain amount even relates to improving my dance skills.
My father continues to do pretty well at rehab, and the current estimate is that he'll be mobile enough to go home in about a week. The physical therapists put him through a good workout each day and he's learning about special devices that help people put on their shoes and socks when they're not allowed to bend over. We are pleased with the general level of cheer and helpfulness shown by the staff, and I'm told the food is pretty good too.
My friend Cesar, being fairly familiar with the dance scene around San Francisco's Mission, has kindly gotten me out a few times. Last Friday we investigated a free waltz and rhumba class at Cheryl Burke Dance. the instruction was good, the music not so exciting, so eventually we moved on to blues dancing on Heron, where the music was more fun.
Before leaving the Cheryl Burke premises, we signed up for free dance "consultation" (new students only). The school does this on a wide variety of dances, so I decided that since I had never done tango and everyone says it is difficult, I would try that. Of course, there's the problem that they teach three kinds of tango. I ended up having my lesson on American tango, on the theory that I would run into more people who did it.
I enjoyed my lesson and felt comfortable with my instructor, so I agreed to have a paid lesson the next day. It would be nice to learn dances in this manner all the time, with expert partners, but I'm afraid my income bracket dictates that most of my education will have to be in classes full of other beginners. After my second lesson, I met up with Cesar and we headed for one of these classes, at CellSpace. It was a good enough class, but we didn't get as far as learning any of the steps, focusing instead on getting the dancers used to paying close attention to their partners. I spent most of the hour walking backwards with my eyes closed. It was good practice and reminded me how differently less experienced partners lead, but I didn't really find out just how Argentine tango differs from American.
We have a plan afoot to gather a group to go dancing Friday. John says he wants to go and Megan is wavering on account (she says) of having biked all the way to Point Reyes over the weekend. I'm not sure who else is in the process of being gathered...

Delicious Revamps

2008-08-03T10:00:00.000+02:00

This morning when I attempted to add a Delicious tag, I had to log in. I almost never have to log in, so I wondered what was going on.
It turns out that Delicious has revamped its functions somewhat. I haven't had a lot of time to investigate, but the main thing that strikes me thus far is that, for those of us who try to bundle our tags, the new system isn't very friendly toward non-bundled tags. They just don't show up anywhere unless you go into the tag-bundling area. You have to go into a specific bundle to actually see all the tags you've ever used, and you have to tell it show you whether tags are used in other bundles.
I do often put a tag in more than one bundle, but I am most concerned to get the tags into at least one, because formerly the unbundled tags were all down at the bottom of the page and I had to scroll down to find them. Now it's even more vital to get them into bundles, because they just aren't anywhere to be seen under normal circumstances.
This is irksome, because while I do go in every few months and update the bundles, even when I've just done it, there are quite a few tags that just don't have a bundle. What am I to do with the tag "friends" for instance? Stick it in the "Practical" bundle? That seems a bit weird. "Fun"? Kind of limited. What about "hypnotism," "looting," "interviews," and "contests"?
Furthermore, certain tags show up as unbundled until you go to the bundle they belong in, with the intent of adding them, only to discover that they really are already there. I am not happy about that.
It looks like the display for tagged sites might be better than before, but I didn't really have a strong opinion on it previously, and I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on it yet now.
We will have to see how this all goes.

On to Rehab

2008-08-02T18:44:00.000+02:00

I am pleased to report that my father was finally okayed to move from the hospital to rehab. His hip replacement surgery was successful and without complications, but since he normally takes various medications, these had to be restarted, and that meant several days of getting his blood in the right condition that the doctors felt he could be allowed to get out of bed more frequently and all that.
The rehab facility is farther from the house, but potentially BART-accessible. It seems like a nice enough place as such things go, and people can (and do) bring pets to visit. My father would like to see the rabbits, but as they dislike traveling in the carrier and are not too fond of sitting on laps, it's unlikely that they'll be making the trip over there.
Rehab will probably last about ten days.

Rabbits and Their Tastes

2008-07-31T20:52:00.001+02:00

Certain rabbits have peculiar culinary interests. I have alluded before to the broad tastes evinced by Calypso Spots, who likes not just most fruits, vegetables, and hays, but also macaroni and cheese, Indian cuisine, nuts, chocolate, gingerbread, yogurt, and countless other things that are best not given her in more than small doses. It was no surprise, then, when she expressed her grave disappointment that I had eaten an entire fortune cookie without giving her any crumbs.
I was much more disturbed to discover that when Orion discovers a pile of fur I have just groomed off him or Ms. Spots, he will proceed to begin eating it as though it were hay. He has done this twice in the past few days, and therefore I think this means that no piles of fur can be left temporarily for him to find.
Could this be the explanation of his abnormal bulk?

Sitting Around

2008-07-28T20:56:00.001+02:00

When one visits a hospital patient, considerable sitting ensues. I suppose it could be worse, since no one says that visitors can't stand, or must refrain from walking around now and then, but no matter what progress the patient is making, the visitor tends to spend a great deal of time sitting there wondering what would make life more interesting for everyone. When the patient is conversational, that's something; when the patient is sleeping soundly, the visitor can actually read a book; but mostly the visitor just sits around keeping an eye on the situation, offering glasses of water, fetching nurses, reminding the patient to exercise in situ, and so on.
On the plus side, the patient in question seemed to improve considerably between 10am and 4pm, and even managed a journey out into the hall using the walker.
After all that excitement, I came home and let a pair of deserving rabbits out into the back yard and settled down to write some fiction since the likelihood of focusing my brain on matters academic seemed very small.

An Update, of Sorts

2008-07-27T22:06:00.000+02:00

What, me dead? Me kidnapped by alien beings telepathically summoned by Orion as he sat in his litterbox?
Well, not quite. I didn't even manage to do the dancing forecast for last weekend (I hasten to say through no particular fault of my own but merely circumstances leading in other directions), although I do recommend the Frida Kahlo and Lee Miller shows up at SFMOMA. (I also recommend the food at the museum cafe.)
I did make it to a great party where I got to see fellow 1990s-era NWU activists.
I have also managed to spend some quality time (as they say) in various Bay Area cafes, communing with my laptop.
Of late I have been acquainting myself with the Kaiser Oakland Hospital, where my father has had the interesting experience of getting a new hip joint. So far I suppose this has gone well enough, although we could do without night-time disorientation that prompts him to think he can get out of bed or that people are out to get him. He is lively enough when wide awake during the day and interested in a topic. I'm not sure the medical staff always appreciate his playful answers to routine questions, however. I suspect his nurse Amelia, who gets along very well with him, purposely asked him who was president just so he could tell her "The president is... Dick Cheney... but the president doesn't know that."
I find that PK of BibliOdyssey, who could have confessed an attachment to Švejk to me long ago, has taken the unheard-of step of scanning illustrations from his own copy of the book to post. Those who haven't got their own copies, or who just want to look at some Josef Lada drawings, or even who just want to read what we all said, might want to take a look.

Berkeley Strikes, Cafes, and Music

2008-07-17T09:31:00.000+02:00

Over the years, when I've gone over to UC Berkeley to use the library, I've periodically found the grad students on strike. They teach many of the undergraduate courses, they (like grad students everywhere) are not paid all that much, and it's extremely expensive to live in the Bay Area. And of course other issues are often involved as well. University of Pittsburgh's grad students aren't unionized, so we always have to hope that the university administration remains benevolent, and that our departments treat us well.
This week a different group of UC workers is on strike: the AFSCME service workers. It's a 5-day strike, called after 11 months of negotiation. These employees include custodians, cooks and food service workers, groundskeepers, bus drivers, building maintenance people, security guards, and so on. These are not types of jobs that historically get very high wages without union support. Life is expensive in the Bay Area, and while I thought gas was expensive in Pittsburgh when it got over $4 per gallon, it's well over that here, so I don't find it surprising that the AFSCME wants a "UC Statewide minimum wage," improvements on overtime pay, and other things.
Having said that, I'm off to The Musical Offering to have another cup of coffee while figuring out just what I need to look up at the library. I'm trying to avoid looking up too much more and just make revisions. Of course, the danger in hanging out at The Musical Offering is that I will buy CDs, since this is the place to go for anything in the early music (or other subsequent classical) line.

Beatrix Potter Drawings

2008-07-16T21:02:00.000+02:00

As my readers may suspect, the Spotted Pair and I have arrived safely in California and are pretending to be very busy. (Well, I am supposed to be, while they are making a show of having much grooming and other business to take care of.) I have actually made two plum and apricot pies, with two more planned for tomorrow, but there are no photos because we ate the evidence.
In the meantime, those who are fond of rabbits and other small animals, or simply have a weakness for wonderful illustration, can go see the rare Beatrix Potter drawings at BibliOdyssey. For the most part I haven't seen any of these elsewhere, although I do have notecards of a different version of the dancing rabbits.
Speaking of dancing, I expect to do a good deal of that over the weekend, assuming of course that I do not break a leg going up or down library steps.

Random Strangeness

2008-07-09T08:29:00.000+02:00

As the rabbits and I prepare for our summer trip to the Bay Area (that is, the California one; I have learned that there's also one in Clear Lake, Texas, which even has some things in common with the California one), we or at least I have encountered various odd, if presumably insignificant, things.
Why, for example, should the glass part of my driver's side mirror choose to fall off? I heard a noise outside as I started the car, and even opened the door to look and see what it was, but didn't see anything. Naturally I later discovered that the mirror was gone and I had run over it.
Why is it that, when I took two blankets to the cleaners a couple of months ago, the tag said they would be ready in a few days and that the cleaners were not responsible for items left over 45 days, but when I came by three weeks later, the blankets were not yet done, and indeed when I came by now (at least 45 days later), they still weren't done and apparently the assumption is that when you bring in blankets for spring cleaning, you want them stored all summer because you won't be needing them? I don't in fact need the blankets yet, but I would prefer to know ahead of time that the cleaners could/would store them. What if I had been moving out of town?
What possessed my cell phone screen to go blank (requiring it to be shipped to T-Mobile for repair or replacement) and the loaner phone, just before I returned it to our local T-Mobile store (which I might add has given me excellent customer service) to suddenly claim I had no voicemail account? Actually, the latter wasn't the loaner phone's problem, but I don't know what caused the voicemail account to disappear for about 8 hours until tech support did some sort of magic and it reappeared complete with saved messages.
Why (not that this is anything new) does my apartment always feel about 20 degrees hotter than the temperature outdoors? I really don't like to listen to the airconditioner, even though I am glad to have it.
Why (not that this is anything new either) must Ms. Spots wait until just after I have swept the floor and emptied the litterbox to leave a pile of droppings in front of said litterbox? I think that, at the age of six, she is a bit too set in her ways to be trained out of this practice. She does use the litterbox, but seems to regard the area in front of it as an adjunct litterbox.
And why, when Megan visited over the weekend, did Orion feel that it was absolutely necessary to invade the bedroom at 6 a.m. and chew not only a phone cord and a USB extension cord (neither normally available to him), but to chew up the cord to Megan's phone charger, which had fallen on the floor during the night?
Pondering these peculiarities of life, I am also pondering whether the rabbits will be easily persuaded into the carrier to go to the airport. Orion is presently sitting in the litterbox doing his special Meditation and Contact with Alien Beings routine, and Ms. Spots is napping by the dining room table, so at the moment it would be easy to put them in the carrier, but we have an hour or so to go before we leave, and they may well decide it's time to move to their daytime napping spot under the couch. But there is no point in putting them in the carrier now, as it is disagreeable enough for them to spend 12-13 hours in the carrier without adding on an extra hour. --What, 12-13 hours just to fly across the US? Well, an hour and a half to get to the airport on the bus, an hour or hour and a half to deal with airport security and all that, and then of course we don't have a direct flight (whatever happened to those?) so we go out of our way to Atlanta and take an hour to change planes, and then it will take an hour or hour and a half to collect the suitcase and take BART at the other end. It always ends up with 12-13 hours of rabbits in carrier, and while they hate it, I must say they take it very well considering everything.

It Still Looks Like a Baby Boom to Me

2008-07-07T20:35:00.000+02:00

I have alluded before to the discrepancy suggested by Pittsburgh demographics (elderly population, deaths outnumber births) and the large number of babies and small children I see almost everywhere I go barring campus.
It is my suspicion that while deaths may outnumber births, this does not mean that there is any shortage of births, but merely a remarkable number of older residents dying off. And, since Pittsburgh has an enormous number of state-of-the-art hospitals, I suspect the city also draws in a lot of patients who live elsewhere but die here.
The Pittsburgh I know is so overrun with infant life that I firmly expect a flipflop in the near future, similar to that which Julia tells me has occurred in the Czech Republic: when I was in Prague, politicians lamented the lack of births but you saw babies everywhere, and now they admit there is a baby boom.
Why do I think Pittsburgh (or parts of it) is crawling with preschool-age children? Well, sit in Tazza d'Oro any day of the week, pretty much any time of day, and you'll see a constant parade of strollers, babes-in-arms, and children old enough to race back and forth shrieking with high spirits. There is a small sign at the counter stating that "Unattended children will be given espresso and a free kitten" but I haven't seen any children who aren't nominally attached to an adult, only those who give the impression of being unattended. I keep meaning to make a count and see whether there are usually more than ten babies and toddlers per hour, or if it just seems that way sometimes.
Since Tazza d'Oro is a magnet for so many neighborhood parents and grandparents, I should not have been surprised that the Highland Park annual neighborhood garage sale was a bit of a disappointment for the non-parents among us. Practically every participating household was getting rid of baby and young-child gear. Almost the only things I ended up buying were lemonade and baked goods sold by entrepreneurs under ten. (Baked goods = excellent, lemonade = awfully watered-down but still thirst-quenching.) Yes, there were places here and there selling furniture and miscellaneous goods, and in a few cases I did see things I might have bought if I hadn't expected to move in a year, but on the whole the non-childhood items were not that numerous and not that much to my taste.
Getting out of my own neighborhood, which after all could be an anomaly, the other day I observed no less than six prams and strollers (some of them twin-sized), plus some preschoolers, all out for air on Ellsworth as I biked to school. The day before I hadn't been counting but did notice a parade of strollers that included one triplet version. I assume that particular display was courtesy of a daycare center but the others seemed to be individual mothers and babysitters.
Let's not forget that the baby-goods store on the corner of Negley and Penn is not only thriving but getting a new and handsomer coat of paint (I am waiting for it to get rid of the dreadful signage of the baby pulling open a musical diaper, but I don't expect that to happen anytime soon).
And, of course, the bus is always full of babies and children under ten. Lately there has been a rise in pregnant women on the bus as well.
All of this infant-life had the unpleasant effect that I recently dreamt I was moving back into a college dormitory that had been redecorated with Winnie-the-Pooh carpeting in the hall and where I noticed an empty triplet stroller parked outside my door. Um, I like Winnie-the-Pooh as much as the next person, but this still struck me as nightmarish.

Toyen Paintings in Houston

2008-07-05T14:02:00.000+02:00

On my Houston trip I saw an impressive amount of art, both belonging to the collector who invited me, and elsewhere. I got to see three Toyen paintings, belonging to two different collectors.
Message of the Forest (1934) is a large work and the girl's head looks better than in reproduction. (Still decapitated, but...)
Bound/Unbound (1925) is quite small, maybe about a foot wide. I actually got to hold this one and examine it closely. It reproduces pretty well in print, though.
Parmi les ombres longues (1943) is a medium-sized work that shows much more detail when seen in person than in reproduction. If you look carefully, you can see that the figure is seated in the midst of a desert, with a city far in the distance.

Houston Transit Adventures

2008-07-03T23:50:00.000+02:00

I've returned from the Houston trip, which was both fun and productive. On the whole, I discovered that Houston is far more appealing than I might have expected, partly because both the collector who invited me and the colleague with whom I stayed went out of their ways to show me around. The Houston area is very green, which always makes a good impression on me (not that I don't like deserts too), and the weather wasn't even boiling hot.
I did see one glaring problem while I was there, however: wheelchair access on buses.
Since I'm not in a wheelchair and don't currently have friends or family (that I know of) in one, I don't spend a lot of time contemplating wheelchair access. I had not paid great attention to advances in bus technology other than to observe that for quite awhile San Francisco has had "kneeling" buses (I wasn't hugely impressed with how that worked but didn't see it in action all that regularly) and that Pittsburgh buses have a very efficient system for loading and unloading wheelchairs.
On the one day that I took the bus in from Clear Lake to downtown Houston, a wheelchair passenger loaded at my stop, which was a large Park-and-Ride facility. The loading was not all that remarkable except that the bus had to be carefully aligned with a specific spot on the pavement or sidewalk, which the bus driver couldn't really see because the wheelchair door was in the center of the bus. An astonishing number of seats had to be folded up, however.
We were soon on our way, and the wheelchair passenger was soon involved in conversation with another passenger who had been studying her Organic Chemistry. It turned out that both of them intend to go to medical school, so they quizzed one another on organic chemistry and discussed their plans.
The faults of the Houston bus became evident when we reached downtown and the wheelchair had to be unloaded. I was seated directly behind, so I had a good view of all the machinations.
I should note that both the San Francisco and Pittsburgh buses put their passengers relatively close to the ground. There are still steps up, which is what their wheelchair mechanisms eliminate, but the passenger does not feel abnormally far from the pavement. The Houston bus was the kind where passengers sit very high, more as you would expect in a bus with a big luggage compartment under them. It was a little unnerving going on the many freeway bridges and having the sensation of teetering on the edge of a cliff. In any case, the altitude of the passenger area meant that the wheelchair probably had to go up and down about four feet. There was a lot of equipment, there were all sorts of controls, and it was rapidly clear that the driver had no idea how to operate any of this.
The driver fiddled with the controls and the ramp for what must have been close to half an hour before agreeing to get help (we were right by the transit center), which acutely embarrassed the unfortunate wheelchair passenger and made him late for his meeting. Fortunately the few people who were left on the bus at that point were in no hurry, and only one person bothered to get off and walk. I was pretty sure my stop was the next one, but I wanted to see how the incident ended; another passenger said that after spending three hours on an airport runway the day before, spending awhile in an airconditioned bus was no big deal.
The wheelchair was ultimately safely unloaded, but we were all made very aware that Houston needs to improve its wheelchair acess on public transit. I was not at all impressed with the complicated machinery on the bus, but it did ultimately work, so as Houston has already bought these buses, the drivers had better be properly trained to operate the wheelchair lifts. There was no excuse for such an incident.
My colleague, who graduated from my department a couple of years ago and thus knows the Pittsburgh buses well, said that Houston has a considerably younger population and thus fewer people who need wheelchair access. She did not think this was any excuse, but it is why the city has gotten away with poor wheelchair access. We agreed that Houston has got some nice bits of public transit (the light rail in the city is good, assuming it goes where you're going) but definitely needs to expand the light rail, develop more options for suburban commuters, and fix the wheelchair problem.
Our Pittsburgh buses don't seem like anything special (even if they do have multilingual greetings plastered all over them, which is a nice touch), but I have a new appreciation for how smoothly the drivers load and unload wheelchair passengers on a daily basis. Our main type of problem with wheelchairs is that often the 71A inbound can't pick up a wheelchair passenger because it already has one onboard and the bus is packed to the gills with standees. We could use a few more buses on that 71A route, okay?

Bingo Expresses His Opinion

2008-06-24T17:20:00.000+02:00

Since I'm about to fly off to Texas to look at some privately owned Toyen originals and other fun Czech modernist items, I thought I had better drop by Animal Rescue League and entertain Bingo for awhile. And, of, course, any other rabbits who chose to be interested.
At home, Ms. Spots takes her daytime nap very seriously, and Orion too is usually sleeping under the couch most of the afternoon. But not Bingo. I don't think Bingo has any preferred nap time. Show any interest in him, and he's ready to get up and go--out of the cage, leaving his scent everywhere possible in the Rabbit Room. The Bingomatic Rabbit is nearly a perpetual motion machine, although he will settle down for long petting sessions after he's run around for awhile.
Bingo's very popular with the rabbit volunteers and has always struck me as a goodnatured creature. Unlike the other bottom-cage rabbits, I've never seen him try to bite any rabbit that ventured close to his cage (today he had Tomas, Maggie, and Babs in a frenzy of territorial aggression).
Bingo apparently does have strong feelings about individuals, however. One person did tell me awhile back that she didn't think he liked her (he warmed up to her during the afternoon, though). Today a young woman dropped by to visit the small animals, and since Bingo was out, she decided to reach over and pet him. To our astonishment, he flew at her snarling! In fact, he did it twice. She said perhaps she smelled too much of cat, and proceeded to make a guinea pig happy instead.
It may indeed be that Bingo doesn't like the smell of cats, but surely he smells cat every day on the shelter workers, and he has no reputation for attacking them. With all due apologies to our visitor, I suspect that Bingo just didn't like her.
Shortly after she left, Bingo settled down for a long and rapturous petting session with a human he knows he likes.

Bingo's Non-Adoption

2008-06-22T22:38:00.001+02:00

This afternoon I enticed Travis, just back from a semester of teaching in Minnesota, over to Animal Rescue League for an afternoon of rabbit-petting (the shelter's Hug-a-Bun Sunday). I hadn't been over there lately due to traveling and the Blackboard class, so I wasn't sure how many familiar faces I'd see.
Sophia and Charlie were still there, as was Babs and the charming spotted pair Hansel and Gretel, but who did I see in the corner cage but... Bingo!
A few weeks ago, Bingo was going into a frenzy of excitement whenever I arrived. Then he was due to be adopted. But here he was in his old spot and looking quite dejected.
Suzanne, one of the official rabbit volunteers, said that he had almost been adopted, but that the girlfriend of the guy who wanted him was much too hesitant about the project and seemed to think Bingo ought to be confined to a small area. This would have been even less appropriate for a rabbit like Bingo than for the average rabbit, so the adoption never went through.
I had, for no rational reason other than wanting Bingo myself, had a feeling that maybe the adoption wouldn't take. I'm glad to know that Suzanne and the other official volunteers (I'm completely unofficial) look out for the rabbits' best interests so carefully. Bingo needs lots of mental stimulation, much of which comes from exploring his surroundings. He's not a good candidate for life in a confined space. He loves two things: activity and petting. If he gets enough playtime, he's ready to be held and petted for long periods, but even without playtime, he needs his petting.
I petted Bingo for a good long time and then we let him roam the room while the other rabbits were petted in enclosures or on laps. He was in a better frame of mind by the end of the day, but was definitely in slow motion compared to a few weeks ago. Suzanne confirmed that the rabbits tend to get depressed if they stay in the shelter for several months, despite the best efforts of the volunteers. I'll have to make a point of visiting him more while I'm in town.
Other rabbits had some very good petting from Travis and the other attendees. A couple of rabbits were brought over in the hopes of finding companions, which was interesting to watch, but no definite matches were made. Anjou, a white rabbit, was introduced to Jubilee and briefly to Sophia, but he was more in the mood to sit on his human's lap than to meet other rabbits. It's possible he was afraid he was being brought back to the shelter to stay.
A very large rabbit--fifteen pounds so not one of the real giants but hefty nonetheless--got to meet Maggie, Jubilee, and Sophia. He was thrilled. Jubilee wasn't crazy about him but both Maggie and Sophia thought he was awfully appealing, even though he was at least three times their size. I thought it wouldn't be hard to bond him with either one of them, but his humans were really looking for a doe closer to him in size, so for the time being Maggie and Sophia will have to live without him.
Travis was much impressed with the friendly rabbits and knowledgeable humans. We agreed that we should mention the rabbit get-togethers to our colleagues, since some of them would really like a pet but feel that grad school isn't the time to get one. An afternoon spent petting shelter rabbits benefits both rabbits and humans.
When I got home, Ms. Spots indicated that she thought the number of scents on my clothes were a bit overwhelming, even though some were familiar. Orion, as usual, took no interest in all the scents and merely wanted to be petted.

Ideas from the Blackboard Class

2008-06-21T09:02:00.000+02:00

We completed our Blackboard/Courseweb training on Thursday afternoon, and I'm sure everyone was glad to get out of the basement of Alumni Hall and away from the surprisingly glary fluorescent lights. I'm not sure how the CIDDE people survive in this environment, although admittedly it doesn't bother me when I go over there to spend a couple of hours with the Digital Sender.
While at times it was tedious, I think we all learned a lot and were impressed with the instructors. Part of what a person gets out of this kind of class is an awareness of what can be done and that there are several ways of doing some of these things. The details can always be looked up in the manual later.
A nice bonus was that each person met individually with someone to discuss how best to arrange specific courses on Blackboard. The Intro to Modern and American Art courses I'll be teaching in the fall are relatively similar in style--both are introductory lecture courses that rely heavily on Powerpoint presentations of the works of art--but we decided that since Intro to Modern (in this iteration) is a once-a-week course (last time I taught it, it met three times a week!), the materials could be divided by week, whereas since American Art is twice a week and divided into units, the materials would be posted by unit rather than week. This would matter more if I had more online readings for American Art, but as it happens, most of the supplemental readings are in two anthologies that will be available at the bookstore.
The Blackboard training definitely gave me some new ideas. Last time I used Blackboard, I didn't use the grading function. Now that I know how it works, I will. More excitingly, there are possibilities for more effective teaching.
Both of these courses (neither being a large lecture) will have the students divide into two groups and each group present readings to the other group. In the past, the groups discussed their readings briefly in class before presenting. This took up class time and I had only a general idea which people were contributing more to the discussion. Blackboard offers online discussion groups, however. This means my groups can do most of their discussion in advance, I can read over their contributions and assign participation credit, and in class they should only need a few minutes together before presenting orally.
Blackboard also has built-in blogs and wikis. I don't see myself using these for my fall courses, but if I get to teach Czech Modernism in the spring, I think I'll have the students create a wiki. The Czech Modernism course would probably be done as one of our upper-division courses that stresses learning to write research papers, and as there are far fewer resources on Czech modernism than on something like Impressionism, having the students incrementally put their findings on a wiki throughout the semester would not only document the progress of their paper research for me, but would strengthen the entire class's knowledge of the topic because they would be building a group resource with citations to their sources. A student preparing a paper on the architect Otakar Novotný would benefit from sources located by a student working on Jan Kotěra, and vice versa. Each student would do his or her own project, yet benefit from the entire group's research.

Plunging into the World of Blackboard

2008-06-18T08:15:00.000+02:00

No sooner had I returned from Minneapolis than I began a four-day intensive training on the system known to us as "Courseweb" and known to the rest of the world as Blackboard. (It turns out that the reason we call it Courseweb is that University of Pittsburgh was an early adopter of the system and it hadn't yet stabilized its name, so the university gave it one that was intended to stick.)
Blackboard, for those not in the academic world, is a means of preparing and disseminating course materials online. You can do everything from just posting the syllabus online to teaching an entire online course.
Blackboard is not mandatory, and I suspect many people in my department are still not using it despite the fact that they put parts of their courses online. I first used it several years ago, the last time I taught, when I used it to post the syllabus, a handout or two, and the Powerpoint presentations from class.
It seemed to me, however, that as I had only used Blackboard once and in a limited way, and as new versions had come out since then, I had really better see what it had to offer me. The university offers several different types and lengths of training, so I decided to go ahead and commit to four full days in the hopes that this would ensure I got more than just basics that I could have figured out on my own.
While tiring and sometimes slow-moving, this four-day version is thorough and goes well beyond Blackboard itself to address ways in which we might want to use it. We have learned, for instance, how to record ourselves digitally using the free software Audacity, and how to put the result up on Blackboard. I doubt I will be recording myself, but it did occur to me that I have mp3 files of some CAA panels and if I ever wanted to assign one of these instead of a reading, this would not be hard to make available. We also had a session relating to images, and while most of the information in that was painfully basic for me (definitions of pixel, JPG, GIF), it was well presented and not basic for most of the others, and I actually got advice on how to deal with the problems I encounter scanning many European books, which use a printing process that often causes a really horrible scanned result. Something about the arrangement of the dots can cause not a classic moiré pattern, but more of a nasty speckly effect, and this can be alleviated by scanning at 300 or more dpi and using the descreen feature, plus if necessary other tools.
We've also had a fairly long session on copyright, which was interesting but perhaps went into too much detail on some aspects of copyright and not enough on others, given what the participants seemed to know about the subject. People had a fairly good grasp of Fair Use, so it was good to have this refined regarding how Fair Use relates to classroom and distance education, but when it became clear that most people in the room (despite having published many articles and books) had no concept of the rights that can be transferred or retained in publishing, I thought that either this topic should have been left to a separate non-Blackboard training or that basic ideas such as First North American Print Rights and Work for Hire ought to have been explained. But I'm used to dealing with writers who have at least looked through Writer's Market or a comparable text before sending off a manuscript. Academic writers are notorious for ignorantly letting their publishers take ownership of their work in ways that no other freelancer would countenance, and this doesn't seem to have changed since I first began thinking about the problem in the early 90s (in a past life, shall we say).
Blackboard is in some ways a relatively complex delivery system, which while designed to give some amount of standardization so that students can easily find what they're looking for, also allows various arrangements of material. Part of becoming proficient at Blackboard is figuring out the best way to arrange the materials so that students can easily find and use them and not end up sending their assignments to the equivalent of Siberia, or send the professor messages that languish in a dungeon unknown to the professor. My needs are more straightforward than those of some teachers, since I rely heavily on Powerpoint, assigned readings, and a small number of writing assignments, but I want these things well placed, so I am looking forward to my private consultation with one of the instructors. I also want to learn how to set up discussion boards so that my students can easiily discuss their readings prior to coming to class and doing group presentations, as this will free up some class time and also give me a clearer sense as to which students are really contributing to the discussion.
That said, it's time to go to class.

Back and Away Again

2008-06-11T12:18:00.001+02:00

The Spotted Pair and I had an uneventful trip to Jesse's, although I enjoyed it more than they did as they dislike car travel and were not too pleased about the heat in Jesse's apartment either. But a pleasant time was had by the human contingent.
The Spotted Pair will be staying home for my next trip, which involves going to Minneapolis for the gigantic Berkshire Women's History Conference, which should be rather exciting. I'll be giving a paper there on the New Woman in interwar Czechoslovakia, which is the last of my rather long string of conference papers. No doubt other tempting conferences will come along, but it seems time to turn some of those papers into articles... well, when not writing other things, like final bits of dissertation and chunks of fiction. Perhaps Ms. Spots could be trained to somehow turn conference papers into articles for me, picking through my notes to add on additional material and get rid of as many images as possible. She is, after all, an intelligent creature. On the other hand, I suspect her interest in my research is almost nil. She believes my time is best spent petting her and purveying yogurt and other treats on demand.

Summer Heat Comes Our Way

2008-06-06T11:13:00.001+02:00

Summer, as people around me note, has finally arrived in Pittsburgh. And it's evidently going to be the standard Pittsburgh summer weather: when I got up this morning it was allegedly 78 degrees, with a high of 92 expected.
As the Spotted Pair and I are driving up to Ann Arbor today to celebrate Jesse's imminent PhD, one would think we might be escaping this excessive heat. But no. The Ann Arbor forecasts are pretty much identical to those for Pittsburgh. Fortunately the car is airconditioned.
I will now continue my packing and see if the Spotted Pair can be lured out from under the couch. I guess I should have left earlier in the day when they were lounging under the dining room window.

Going, Going... Bingo!

2008-06-05T21:20:00.000+02:00

When I stopped by the Animal Rescue League late yesterday afternoon, all the rabbits were surprisingly sleepy--except, of course, Bingo, who wanted my attention right away. Bingo wanted to be petted for a long, long time, and then he wanted to go out and take a tour of the floor.
In the meantime I noticed a note on the board announcing that Bingo was "pending adoption." Not knowing when the adoption might be final, I thought I had better spend some good time with my pal.
And this afternoon I saw that he had been taken off the adoptable list, so I assume he has gone to his new home.
I hope, of course, that his new home satisfies all his dreams. But I feel ambivalent, since I'll probably never see him again.
I'm fond of all the rabbits there, but it's only natural that some interest me more than others. I try to spend time with Sophia because she's a shy rabbit who needs a friend. I try to persuade Charlie not to head for the back of his cage whenever I open the door (Charlie is determined not to be petted, it seems). I'm making an effort to pet Babs more because even though she hates other rabbits, she likes to be petted. Basil was just one of those beings that anyone in their right mind would take to. There have certainly been several rabbits who made me want to take them home.
At the same time, a person just forms a special connection with specific individuals, whether other humans or members of another species. Calypso Spots and I have that connection, and Orion has it with Calypso Spots. Bingo is quite a different rabbit from Ms. Spots (the Princess of Pittsburgh or Spotted Odalisque), but we were developing that connection. It's too bad I haven't felt that my circumstances allowed me to get another rabbit. I'll always remember Bingo, just as I'll always remember a rabbit named Bombay who I could have adopted but thought would be bullied by my doe Penelope.
I hope Bingo's new human doesn't mind that he still sprays, that he likes to chew and shred things, and that his new human enjoys the way he races around. I hope his new human thinks he's the finest rabbit in history and gives him lots of petting, and finds him a good doe for company (he and Honey did flirt quite a bit). Bingo's a highly intelligent creature and will be glad to live with the right human.

Now What?

2008-06-02T22:20:00.000+02:00

The number of rabbits at Animal Rescue League was dropping in a most satisfactory way. Not only was Basil adopted, but apparently so was the little lionhead rabbit (who was another of those exceptionally nice beings), and perhaps one or two others. And when I stopped by on Sunday afternoon, I discovered that Guapo, the white rex, who wants nothing else in life but to be petted by a nice human, seems to have found his human. One of the other Pittsburgh House Rabbit members, who was grieving her lost rabbit, had come to see Guapo and the two of them fell in love. I'm not sure how Guapo will be able to stand the wait until the adoption can be taken care of, because he likes this human even more than he likes me.
Sophia was in one of her shy moods, but Bingo was greatly excited to see me, so I decided I might as well settle down with him. He was so thrilled to be petted that he didn't even try to get out of the cage, and we had a very long session, after which I thought I should pet a few other rabbits, like the charming young spotted pair known as Hansel and Gretel. (They look somewhat like Orion did in his youth, long and slim, so let's hope they stay that way rather than turning into poster bunnies for Lapine Obesity Prevention.)
But Bingo kept asking me to come back, so we had some more petting and then he persuaded me to let him out. The chart in the rabbit room indicated he had already been out (as had all the rabbits), but Bingo can doubtless use all the exercise time he's given.
Whether it was that he had already been out, or that there were two humans sitting on the floor, for once Bingo was equally interested in running around and in coming over to greet us. Once or twice he even climbed into my lap, which is more than the pair at home are willing to do. (They'll put their paws on my leg and look like they're considering the idea, but they wouldn't dream of actually hopping into my lap.)
I can see why Bingo wouldn't appeal to everyone--he's a whirlwind of activity--but he's very intelligent and goodnatured. I wish I could take him home. But of course Ms. Spots and Orion would have an opinion on that, and I think Ms. Spots would have the deciding vote, as Senior Rabbit. She does find Bingo's scent of great interest, whereas Orion is much more interested in my bedding than in any possible trace of Bingo on my clothes.
There are rumors abroad that Bingo and Honey have taken an interest in one another. It's true Honey doesn't mind Bingo romping in front of her cage, but for that matter Jubilee seems to have decided he might be ok too. (There is no hope that Babs will take to him. She even growls at Guapo. She likes to be petted, though.) Honey looks like a very fine rabbit, but I confess I have more of an interest in Sophia, who needs enough petting to bring out her true personality. Sophia strikes me as a rabbit who could end up as confident and friendly as Ms. Spots, given the right home.
In the meantime, however, it appears the shelter has had a population explosion. There were about 10 rabbits there when we left Sunday afternoon, but this evening no less than 6 spotted rabbits have joined the list. They must have been dropped off sometime today.
These new rabbits are described as English Spot, but I think they are simply spotted rabbits. Judging by the photos, they're a very attractive group. But why six at once?
Every time there's a little progress on the adoption front, more animals arrive.
Two words: SPAY and NEUTER.
And don't get animals you can't keep.

Alternative Focus at Silver Eye

2008-06-01T08:41:00.001+02:00

Readers in the Pittsburgh area might want to go and check out the Alternative Focus exhibition at Silver Eye Center for Photography. The show, up until June 14, features pinhole photography by Jesseca Ferguson and Tom Persinger.
The two photographers use the same basic technique of lensless photography to achieve very different effects with disparate subjects.
Jesseca Ferguson assembles still lifes using objects she has collected, prints the result using various older photographic techniques, and then incorporates them into assemblages in which old papers and book covers become background to the photograph. I liked the general effect, but was a little disturbed that in some of the works she had used old handwritten documents (letters?), all of which seemed to be in Polish. As a historically minded person, I wanted to know what these documents said (I can read a little Polish and recognized a lot of words, but not enough of the documents were visible) and to feel sure that these weren't anything anyone would ever want. I had the feeling that somebody's interesting account of immigrant life was probably irretrievably cut up and glued up, and this bothered me. As a collage artist myself, I'm always torn between enchantment at the effects people achieve with old materials, and anxiety that they could be ignorantly tearing up valuable books, documents, and photos that simply happened to be available cheap. One man's junk is another man's treasure, but it could be treasure in one way to one person and treasure in quite another way to someone else.
Tom Persinger's photographs, which were what I had come to see, are scenes of forests and swamps. The pinhole process requires longish exposures, so the images are not crisp (leaves move a little, water refuses to be still), but have a rich, almost velvety look. I'm not sure how much of this is the result of the pinhole technique and how much is his printing process (I think they were all silver gelatin prints). There was a time when I was fairly serious about photography, but I only got as far as learning the basics of doing my own prints, so I'm ignorant about the benefits of different printing processes.
One Tree, 2006, copyright Tom Persinger
You can see more examples of the photographs here.

Not Quite as Bad as the Chinese Earthquake, but Still Dreadful

2008-05-31T21:21:00.000+02:00

Like many people around the country, I was shocked and unsettled to hear that Ted Kennedy's recent seizure was the result of a brain tumor. I've known at least four people who have died of brain tumors in the past twenty years--two in fact were co-workers at the same place.
And, like lots of people, I'm just enough of a hypochondriac that any weird change in my functioning makes me wonder if I've got one (when it isn't some other nasty possibility). Incoherent without drugs or alcohol? Must be a brain tumor. Dropped something yet again? Must be a brain tumor.
I hadn't realized, however, that brain tumors tend to be hard to detect, that there are more of them than there used to be, and that it can be hard to get the real prognosis out of the medical people. Susie Bright's comments (her father died of one) are enlightening.
Note: I wouldn't say I have been exactly obsessing about brain tumors of late, being too busy with my various projects. But it's better to know about these things.

Basil Finds a Home!

2008-05-30T19:43:00.001+02:00

That wonderfully lovable character Basil has been adopted! He wasn't at the shelter when I dropped by this afternoon to supply some petting--the rabbit population was down by at least two since my last visit--but I wasn't sure whether he had been adopted or gone to a foster home until I visited his web page.
Of course, Basil is such a gentle and delightful creature that it is no surprise someone felt the need to take him home. I hope that his new human adores him utterly and that they have a long and rapturous life together.
Sophia, meanwhile, was initially shy but decided to be brave and come to the front of the cage for an extremely long petting session. I didn't think she was ever going to lose interest, and since she needs lots of petting, I didn't want to stop until she was ready. All the other rabbits became very restive as it dawned on them that Sophia was getting something like twenty minutes of nonstop petting. Bingo did everything he could think of to get my attention, but since he's a favorite of mine, I thought I should be fair and pet a few others first for fear they might not get any. By the time I got to him, he was almost ready to expire from fear he might not get petted. Unfortunately his cage is in a difficult corner and I have to move his neighbor's cage to open his door, let alone sit with him. But he was very glad to be petted. Bingo's white rex neighbor, an older rabbit who looks as if he's been chewed on, also needed a great deal of petting as he's a very lonely creature, and even Bingo's other neighbor, who is highly territorial, was grateful to get a little attention. The gentle little lionhead rabbit I met last time is pending adoption, but he seemed convinced that the only desirable outcome would be for me to take him home myself. I hope his adoption goes through and provides him with massive amounts of affection.