Busy or Just Wasting Time?

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.

Nearly There

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.

Architecture, Film, Posters, and More!

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.

Weekend Entertainments

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.)

Czech Resources Online

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.

Here's Looking at You, Squid!

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.

An Update, of Sorts

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.

Pittsburgh Deaths Outnumber Births?

Apparently Pittsburgh is joining rural areas in being one of the few urban centers where deaths outnumber births. I suppose the numbers are convincing, but between my neighborhood and the university, the evidence was making me assume we were having a baby boom. I grant that Pittsburgh's student population comes from all over the world, but Highland Park and East Liberty are full of babies and small children.
It's sort of like the Czech Republic, where officials worry about population decline but the visual evidence suggests that babies are taking over.

Syllabi and Other Amusements

After a couple of weeks of intensive work on syllabi and class presentations, I think the main thing that can be said is that this sort of project does not incline one to spend much time on a computer for other things. This results in a lack of inclination to blog, although on the plus side I've read more novels lately.
One of my goals for the summer is to accomplish pretty much all the prep for next year's teaching before the fall semester starts, and as I'm not teaching summer school, this should be quite doable. It also provides a nice break from certain other academic projects, which we can only hope will be beneficial to the end product.
I don't, actually, mind working on syllabi and presentations just now. Mentally, it is rather enjoyable. It gives me a chance to root through articles I haven't read in years, in order to decide what might make suitable reading for undergrads. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it's a little frustrating.
For example, it looks as though in the fall I'll be teaching one section of Intro to Modern Art and one of American Art. I've taught Intro to Modern before and it went well, so there the question is what ought to be improved (Kristen and I are trying to think what would be a particularly good supplementary reading on Russian modernism, and I am unsure which readings on surrealism would be best, as I am too close to the subject).
I've never taught American, but I've had good preparation for it and am basing my syllabus on the one used by our department chair, which is set up in a way I like but requires some shifting around as his areas of expertise are rather different than mine. (Yes, I will be including city planning and public monuments, but I will have more to say on genre painting and early 20th century art.)
On these introductory courses, I like to combine readings from a survey text with readings that are more challenging and specific, so I was delighted to rediscover just how interesting and accessible that essays in two of my American art anthologies were. I managed to find six essays in each one that fit themes we will cover. There are very few more readings to come up with for this class (anyone want to suggest one on the rise of American history painting? a favorite on colonial/early 19th-century women's art and design?), so I am mainly working on my images for this class now.
Um, yes. Images and presentations. We have pretty much switched from slides to digital images, but this isn't to say our slide collection has really been digitized. Some of our slides were, but for the most part it seems as though each instructor is on his/her own hunting down images. We subscribe to ArtStor, so this is somewhat helpful, but for various reasons I am finding it very slow and tedious to assemble my American presentations, and have only gotten as far as (in a rudimentary fashion) early 19th-century landscape. This reminds me how, when I first taught Intro to Modern, I spent a good part of each week hunting for the images for that, which I felt left me little time to think about what I was going to say in lecture. (Fortunately, the sight of the pictures generally cues me on what I want to say about them.) The advantage of the digital presentations is, of course, that once they are made, you have them and can revise them in a leisurely way from year to year, so I am making small changes in my Modern presentations but not having to make them again from scratch. It will be nice once the American presentations reach that stage.
Meanwhile, it is probable that sooner or later I will teach a course on Czech modernism--maybe even as soon as Spring 2009--so that's more gradually underway. The presentations for that are much more fun to craft. As I have gradually been scanning more and more Czech modern art over the past 4-5 years, I have a very usable personal collection of images. While it is strongest on Czech surrealism, there is enough of everything else to get a good start on things. Rather than having to be logged into ArtStor and doing painful searches for Copley and trying to decide which Copleys to use and which photo of each painting is clearest, then downloading them and gradually incorporating them, I tend to think "Ah, Emil Filla needs to be included. These two will work for his Munch-like period, these are early cubist works, and these are examples of his (in my opinion) slavish imitation of Picasso." Or "These five views of one of Chochol's cubist houses will give a very nice idea of the building as seen from the street, so which one will be shown large and which ones will be supplementary?" And I realize that yes, I have enough Špála to show for a class, but that I should scan more because four Špála paintings are not really enough. It would be nice to have some of his controversial illustrations for Babička. And well, much more symbolist and decadent art needs to be scanned, and somewhere I need to come up with some examples of Mánes and Aleš.
This sort of thing easily takes up the whole day and wears out my computer-tolerance.
But, for amusement, I have visited Bingo and the other Animal Rescue League rabbits (there are currently several, not just Bingo, that I would really like to take home--Ms. Spots is deeply interested in the scent left on my pants). And last night our medieval Scandinavian specialist held a party celebrating the Norwegian national holiday syttende mai (Constitution Day) and I am very sorry I didn't take my camera along to photograph the elegantly iced cookies she made in the shape of the Norwegian flag, conifers, and moose. The soundtrack for the evening was a somewhat bizarre mix of Norwegian rap music (it exists and it's really strange to listen to), Norwegian-themed songs, and the occasional bit of ordinary party music. We were transfixed by a peculiar song about going out to plunder... I said I would have to give her my mp3s of Scandinavian traditional music--hardanger fiddle and so on--to round out the collection.

Kotěra and Tram Design

After a long day of mostly working on presentations relating to a course in American Art that I expect to teach before long, I think a little more Jan Kotěra design is called for. Not only did Kotěra make his name as a pioneering modernist architect, but he designed a number of rail and tram cars. Those that follow were all designed for the Prague Transit Company.

Luxury four-axle car no. 200, 1899

Two-axle car from 1904-5

Two-axle car no. 193, from 1906

I might note that Kristen tells me that not only are there people who would like to reinstate tram service (streetcars) in Pittsburgh, but that generally speaking, the old rails are still in place and just covered with asphalt. I'm all in favor of bringing back America's streetcars, and I say the sooner the better. And of course putting in more subways.

Jan Kotěra

For various reasons, mainly procrastination regarding finishing up my next conference paper, I have been spending the week working on syllabi for the classes I might be teaching next year. There have, however, been some other entertainments. For one thing, the week-long Greek Food Festival at Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral (practically next door to the Fine Arts building). And also discovering that the library apparently acquired some new books on Czech art while I was in Prague, like a hefty and gloriously illustrated volume on the early modernist architect Jan Kotěra. I think I could be content living in a Kotěra villa.

Design for the Elbogen Villa, 1905

The Národní dům (National House) in Prostějov, 1905-7--theater entrance

The Sucharda villa

The Sucharda villa, interior

The Sucharda villa, interior

First Republic Women

I've now returned from the weekend's jaunt to Northwestern (just outside Chicago) for the annual Czech Workshop. There were two full days' worth of interesting papers on all things Czech, ranging chronologically from (if memory serves me) the 19th century to the present. Mine was on First Republic visual imagery of women in periodicals and fine art, and without further ado I give you a few of the pictures I showed:

Štyrský in a Return Engagement

The astonishing number of visitors to this blog in recent months who seek pictures by Jindřich Štyrský has not escaped my notice. I'm curious why this is (it didn't begin during the Štyrský exhibition in Prague), but just on general principles, it seems like time to put up another Štyrský work for everyone's viewing pleasure.
(And I see that the scan is a bit askew. Um, it dates back to when I was first scanning and hadn't learned to rotate in Photoshop. I regret to say that some of the people who gave papers at CAA this year apparently haven't learned to straighten their scans either. I attended at least one talk where everything looked about like this. I hope no one takes one skewed image on a whole blog as a sign of unprofessional laxness and ineptitude...)

Eastern European Music from Ann Arbor

Jesse reminds me that every Thursday night from 9-10 Eastern Time he DJs Eastern European music on WCBN. You can tune in and listen on the internet at http://www.wcbn.org/listen.html. I'm bad at remembering to do anything at a particular time in the evening, but when I do remember to listen, there's always something interesting and unexpected, like Slovak jazz.
WCBN offers several kinds of download, so there should be something for every connection speed. I tested out the 128 kbps hi-res and it sounded pretty good.

Citations That Annoy

I confess I am utterly baffled and annoyed by citations that lead me astray. This afternoon I received two works by interlibrary loan (one physical, one electronic), whose sole utility for me was that I wanted to see the originals that my sources had cited.
The electronic file, while I admit I was excited to get (I had not managed to get the book in Prague) was, first off, apparently scanned from a photocopy, or with some really peculiar setting on the scanner that rendered the print abnormally pale. But I can live with that. Secondly, either the photocopy or the original book had its page numbers chopped off, so there was no easy way of determining what page anything was. This is, I might point out, a weird but not uncommon problem with Czech books and periodicals; for reasons unknown to me, when they were bound for the library the bindery seemed to take sadistic glee in cutting off the margins so that the page numbers and perhaps some of the text is entirely missing. In this case, however, I was able to ascertain that the portion I wanted began (said the table of contents) on page 69. My source, however, claimed that the information was on pages 63-64, which was not possible. As I was not seeking a specific quotation but a whole range of ideas, and had many other things to do, I soon concluded that reading through a fair number of pages in very faint Czech in order to say that I personally had seen them was not worth my time, so I let the original citation stand in its incorrectness (not being, I feel sure, wholly incorrect but merely a few pages off). This pained me but once in awhile I do sacrifice my principles, at least on subsidiary points such as this happened to be. Someone else can follow my source and track down which page she really meant.
I then turned to the other item. My source here (a different author) claimed that a quotation existed on page 257. I rapidly discovered that the book did not have that many pages. It did not even have 157. Nor was the quote to be found on page 57. In this case, as the book was very short and the print was very legible, not to mention in English, I started flipping through it page by page. I was about to conclude that my source was inventing the quotation out of thin air when I discovered it, in a slightly different form, on page 109. As it happens, there is text surrounding it that is even more germane to my purposes. This is why we look these things up.
Otherwise, life continues in its usual path. My advisor is now in possession of chapters 5, 6, and 7, and has suggested that I gather some hardy souls to give me a fake job interview so that any stupidities I might want to utter will be rooted out. I have also prevailed upon another member of the faculty (who has also agreed to pretend to be an especially dimwitted interviewer who will ask me questions of grotesque stupidity and nastiness) to go over my French translations. We amused ourselves with this at dinner last night and I am now confident that if any of my translations from French are clumsy in style, it is because they were that way in the original.
I do not, in fact, presently have any job interviews lined up, but everyone assures me that this is normal and means that the places to which I have applied have not finished going through the applications.

Moving Right Along...

Chapter 4 went to my advisor shortly after it went to My Sibling, and to my astonishment she had read it just two days later. (The fact that she also had a draft of my journal article to read probably moved things along.) While she requested more references to Toyen (the chapter deals with surrealist--primarily French--attitudes about women, sex, love, and gender), on the whole she seemed to think it was okay. She assured me that I need not fear that my committee would find my dissertation boring.
My Sibling is in the process of giving it the steely eye of the fanatical copyeditor, and will be sure to let me know of any and all unclear bits, stupidities, and failures to punctuate properly.
All this being the case, and my having had an extension on my journal article's deadline, I am wrestling with Chapters 5 and 6, which were supposed to be last week's project. These were originally one chapter, and there seems to be no way of shrinking them back to that size, but over the past year or so the pieces of these chapters have been reshuffled several times. Following historical precedent, then, I reshuffled them yet again today. (One can only hope that this will be the last time.) I have also written some new chunks about Štyrský's early 1930s projects Edice 69 and the Erotická revue, since one can hardly neglect these in any discussion of Toyen.
I am, therefore, filled with a perhaps groundless optimism that tomorrow I might succeed in finishing off Chapter 5 (for now) and that Chapter 6 might follow suit on Wednesday, permitting me to embark on ... hmmm... this week's project of Chapter 7.
I don't recall Chapter 7 seeming particularly near completion, as last time I had anything to do with it I was worrying about where to plant my discussions of surrealist literary precursors Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Mácha and Deml. Well, actually it would be an exaggeration to call my remarks on Baudelaire and Rimbaud "discussion," but they do get mentioned, which is more than I can say for some of the surrealist precursors. I am reminded that, some years back when I gave a departmental presentation on my research, our medieval specialist enjoined me to be sure to pay close attention to the poetry. And, while she is under no compulsion to read my dissertation, I have concluded that 1) she was right and 2) I will never, no matter how I pursue the matter, really succeed in paying quite enough attention to the poetry (either in French or in Czech).
Fortunately, the matter of literary precursors takes up a rather small portion of Chapter 7 and there is some hope that whatever I did on the last edit may have settled them in permanent resting places. After all, they are only there in regard to their significance for the Prague surrealists not surrealism in general.

Still Life with Dissertation

Life in Pittsburgh continues to be nearly All Dissertation, All the Time. (This is, of course, not counting emptying the litterboxes and replacing phone cords that Orion bites into as many pieces as possible in an effort to thwart potential employers from reaching me.)
While I like working on my dissertation, even nearly all the time, I do not feel the same way about having to turn it in by the end of February if I am to graduate in the spring. I really detest this deadline.
Granted, the world will not end if I don't graduate this spring--I still have a year of funding left, and furthermore my department has instituted two Visiting Professor positions that give preference to its own ABD students and graduates. But I would not like to have to turn down an offer from somewhere else on the grounds that I hadn't finished when I expected to.
Finishing in the spring is entirely possible, it is merely a stressful prospect for a person who revises slowly and has a lot of text and images to deal with.
Grad students who do not deal with images really don't know how fortunate they are, time-wise. I have been scanning and photographing images for my dissertation for about five years now, so you would think I could hardly have any problem here, but there are always images one realizes one ought to get, or that somehow one hasn't gotten details about, or some stupid thing. The average art history dissertation uses several hundred images, and mine is no exception.
Once one has most of the images, there's the question of how to put them in order and caption them. Word-processing programs are not really all that great at handling high-res images and their captions. Neither Word nor Nota Bene really pleased me on this. Nota Bene at least admits that this is not its forte; Word likes to pretend it can do anything, but I've always had a lot of trouble getting images to stay where I want them in Word. For awhile, I was sticking each image in a separate Word file, but then it occurred to me that while I don't especially like using Powerpoint for presentations (it is not very art-history friendly, being designed for business), it might work just fine for this purpose since (due to copyright issues) the only persons allowed to see the images are members of my committee. (Yes, this is absurd, but that's how we're getting around the electronic-publishing aspect of dissertations and copyright. I will be happy to show my friends and family the images privately.)
Powerpoint does have its own peculiarities. It doesn't allow portrait and landscape orientations in the same file, for example. This is incredibly stupid, and means that I have to put the landscape-oriented pages in separate files. The committee will only see the printout, though, which will be properly collated. Powerpoint also has very few layout templates. In the 2007 version, it no longer has the four-image layout, so you have to make your own for pretty much everything with a caption at the bottom of the page. I created a couple of templates, but they aren't completely satisfactory.
Meanwhile, of course, the text still has to be cut and polished. I grew weary of cutting for cutting's sake and turned to polishing up Chapter 4, which is now in the hands of My Sibling for editorial comments. With luck I will finish off 5 and 6 this week (at the same time as revising a journal article, so let's not get too optimistic here). Ideally 5 and 6 would collapse into the one chapter they once were, but this isn't looking very likely. I think my advisor will have to start suggesting cuts if she wants me to get rid of entire sections rather than paragraphs here and there.
I wouldn't say there are hordes of amusing quotations in Chapter 5, but I will offer up the following:

"When the modern woman... strives fanatically toward equality with the man and uses the means of fashion to demonstrate her masculinization by suppressing the female and imitating the male secondary sexual characteristics, the sexual instinct is bound to be irritated and enter the dangerous field of perversion." (Curt Moreck)

"In our capitalistic circumstances we only hear that the stork brings children, but that's not true." (Marie N., in Tvorba)

"In Prague there are, as already stated, a great many inverts." (Moravská orlice as quoted in Nový hlas)

"The sexual question takes up almost the largest part of our magazine, because sexuality was, is, and will be the most newsworthy life problem and the whole world revolves around it." (Moderní hygiena)

And there you have it.

Continuing to Slice

I was not in an energetic frame of mind on New Year's Eve, nor were certain of my "known associates," so my mother persuaded me that we should take a look at some of our slides, those things we were planning to scan except that the slide scanner we ordered never arrived.
I was all for looking at slides, but for some reason we got into a box that was mostly pictures from my first four months of life. While my parents thought these were pretty exciting, I cannot say that baby pictures are really of great interest to me, even if I am the subject. Unfortunately my birth seems to have diverted my parents from photographing their rabbit, who was much handsomer, and there were only two pictures of him in the whole batch. C'est la vie...
And, life being what it is, I have continued chopping my dissertation into smaller and more manageable chunks. It has lost at least 20 pages in the past few days, and (more important) become better organized. I'm not sure that we should think of this as any kind of bonsai operation, however.
The pruning process does cause me to pay close attention to quotations. For example, from today's chapter:

"They [Ivan Goll's group] define surrealism wholly in the Apollinairean sense as the transposition of reality to the sphere of poetry, the direct suspension of reality without ideology and abstract logic, without parasitic naturalism." (Teige)

"[The Surrealists] exalt masturbation, pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism and, finally, bestiality." (Ilya Ehrenburg)

"Psychoanalysis confirms that art is a regression to infantile experience." (Nezval)

"Art today is harakiri on reality." (Nezval)

"They will all rise, the man-letter, the gnawed bone, the full stop, comma, altar, crutch, staircase, claw, stuffing, the man-coffin, whistle, shoelace, pebble, luggage, cubes of mist and man-sediment. There will rise liquid beings made of cotton wool, snake skins, feathered trees, in fragments, beings withering at the hip, stuck together from words, borne by the wind, full of pustules, nourished by ice, in outline, hollow beings, modelled in snow, in raw meat and in sand.” (Štyrský)

I don't plan to cut any of these.

Increase Thy Vocabulary

In general, I think it is safe to say that I have a fairly large vocabulary. The dissertation, however, is enlarging it with all sorts of obscure and often bizarre words.
Take, for example:
cryptesthesia: Mentioned by Breton in the Second Manifesto as something the surrealists ought to investigate, this refers to paranormal perception, such as clairvoyance. (Well, why didn't he just say clairvoyance?)
paletot: The English word for the Czech "paleto," used by Vítězslav Tichý to describe the suspended garment seen by the fox in one of Toyen's collages for Ani labuť, ani Lůna, this term refers to a type of 19th-century women's coat similar to a pelisse. Now, at least I had heard of the pelisse. I wasn't sure, however, from the illustrations of paletots that the garment in the collage qualified. Maybe it is really a pelisse. Then again, who really knows? I'm pretty good on costume history, but admittedly that was the only costume class I didn't take during my theatrical past.
lambitus: This term, a favorite of Bohuslav Brouk, but not to be found in any of the Czech dictionaries I consulted in Prague, turned out to refer to oral sex (female recipient). I don't know whether Brouk's readers had to look this one up. The vernacular term is more descriptive.
Sometimes, of course, my failure to type in the correct spelling leads to problems. When I typed in "pusta," Lingea Lexicon assured me that it meant "puszta." I gazed at this in astonishment and was unable to find any useful English meaning for "puszta." Eventually, I realized that I meant to type "pustá," which means bleak or desolate. Toyen was rather fond of bleak and desolate landscapes, although I wouldn't class the scene with the fox and paletot as exactly one of them.

Let's hope that 2008 will not be unusually bleak, and that on the contrary it will be rich in cryptesthesia, that those who wish for paletots will get them, and that there will also be a general abundance of lambitus.


Note: A reader informs me that while "puszta" refers, seemingly non-usefully, to the Hungarian steppe (a meaning I had encountered), like the Czech "pustá" it also means bleak and desolate. Let's hear it for Slavic-FinnoUgric borrowing...

Christmas in the East Bay

Christmas has come and gone with somewhat less attention paid than usual, although we did have one guest and he arrived laden with baked goods.
There were some special moments, of course. For example, we usually do a dramatic reading of the Christmas letter from one of my father's old schoolmates, since it always features a cavalcade of memorable items. This year's edition included news of the correspondent's colonoscopy, being "put to sleep" over a dental matter, and apparently having had an eye removed instead of the scheduled cataract surgery. We were ...ahem... impressed that anyone would be in shape to write a Christmas letter after all that. There was also a long string of deaths (referred to by My Sibling as The Death List).
Then there was My Sibling's discovery that someone had chewed a hole in the new air mattress upon which he was to sleep (Orion is the prime suspect in this crime).
Before and after our guest's visit, My Sibling kindly helped me go over some portions of the dissertation, especially the Czech translations. We were entranced by a section of a František Götz essay in which Götz characterized the Devětsil generation (this was one of many 1920s articles discussing the three culturally active generations of the day). Götz began by calling the generation embryonic, which was fair enough. Initially we thought he was describing it as sucking the life-blood from worldwide culture, so we were disappointed to find that he really only said it sucked nutrients from the rest of the world. After all, Götz can be a pretty lively writer in his way. No vampirism this time, though.
And, while I was attempting to put the finishing touches on the Christmas Day cooking, my parents distracted me by reading specially heartwarming segments of Newsweek, particularly a story about the search for senator Larry Craig's special bathroom in the Twin Cities airport. When my father announced that the reporter had "scooped out the stalls," I really had to inquire whether this was an airport bathroom or a barn. I guess the stalls had actually merely been scoped out.
There was some discussion over whether it was okay to cobble together wrapping from a couple of pieces of our stash of ancient recycled holiday paper. The verdict was that "if it's eccentric it's okay, but if it's crappy, it's not."
I dug up our Christmas records and tried to play them, but something seemed to have happened to the wiring for the old mono speaker my parents have been using in preference to the stereo speakers I left them. We ended up trying Pandora's Classical Christmas offering, which despite the limitations of my laptop speakers was a pretty satisfactory alternative.
This year's presents included items from the Blogosphere. One of my friends gave me a copy of Disapproving Rabbits, from the blog of the same name, which caused merriment around the house and seemed to prompt the lapines to practice some disapproval (not their usual habit, unlike some people's lapines). The copy of the BibliOdyssey book I gave My Sibling was much admired.
Finally, the new computer for the Parental Units arrived on Christmas Eve, but their slide scanner hasn't yet shown up. Of course, we're still configuring the computer and learning how Vista works...