Defense Done

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.

Election Day Arrives

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.

Election Oddities

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.

The Mid-Semester Is Upon Us

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.

Say What? The Perils of Dress

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

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

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.

And Sometimes Everything Is Awful

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

A Little Revamping

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.

"Mardi Gras in Hawaii"?

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?

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

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

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

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.

It Still Looks Like a Baby Boom to Me

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.

Houston Transit Adventures

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

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

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

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

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.