The Return from Manchester and the AAH

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.

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.

Toyen Paintings in Houston

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.

Goethe as Light Reading

I thought I should take a look at Goethe's Elective Affinities, since Toyen did title a painting after it, but after going through a bit of it I decided that the basic idea was clear to me and reading the book itself fell more into the category of something that could be read on the bus (on those occasions when fellow passengers are not too distracting, which some of them can really be to the point where you wonder why the bus driver isn't wearing earplugs).
John tells me he is currently using Werther for much the same purpose, although he is much better than I am at always having something to read on the bus.
We aren't sure what Goethe would have thought of this use of his works, however.
Or what Goethe would have thought of Toyen's painting.

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.

Slice and Dice

The process of cutting the dissertation to a manageable size continues. It's moving along, but never as quickly as one would like. I've managed to cut about 80 pages since beginning the operation, about 60 of which have been in the past two weeks (when I was hoping to do 100 pages a week).
In some ways, the cutting is not all that hard. I put an uncut version of the manuscript in a separate directory before starting to cut, so that nothing is actually lost. I expect to use a lot of what I'm cutting in conference papers and articles, so I am not feeling too sentimental about leaving out valuable data.
On the other hand, I'm reluctant to remove anything I might still want to use in the dissertation itself, so this makes the process slower. Yesterday I had every intention of chopping out a page of chronology notes about the formation of the Prague surrealist group, but when it came right down to it I had that feeling that I still needed it sitting in the text where I could easily refer to it. Decisions like that meant that instead of chopping the desired 10 pages or so from the chapter, the result was only 2. They will, however, eventually go. And my account of the Prague surrealist group in the 1930s is considerably improved over what it was yesterday morning.
It does irk me, I confess, that our spring semester ends at the start of May rather than in June. This means I have only two months left to finish all my edits and rewrites (deadline: March 1). It can be done and I intend that it will be done, but it will be a tiring endeavor.

Another Night in New Orleans

Well, AAASS (giganto Slavic conference) has ended. Kristen has posted her photos of New Orleans and gone home, and as my plane ticket is for a day later, tonight I'm bunking with Jesse and a couple of other guys at a less grandiose hotel. Interesting how the conference hotel charges extra for internet, has no full-length mirror in room (that I noticed), no bathroom fan, and has but one towel bar which is located inside the shower (?! how do you keep track of whose hand towel is which between maid services?). Other hotel has free wifi, full-length mirror in closet. Haven't checked the bathroom situation. But I will say that the conference hotel was 100% nonsmoking, which meant it actually smelled relatively fresh.
On the whole I have a good opinion of the whole thing. Though my panel experienced some anxiety over our absent discussant and the fact that the program listed a panelist who had dropped out back in August, it actually went quite well. I did not get laryngitis as feared, nor did Jesse although he had a cold that did interesting things to his voice, and Shawn appeared to be in perfect health. Even though the panel began at 8:00 in the morning and none of us were exactly famous, we drew a respectable crowd of at least 11 people (there were over 30 other panels competing with us for audience, and the day before I had been almost the only attendee at a very good panel). The audience was attentive and there was a satisfactory amount of discussion, so the three of us feel very pleased with ourselves.
I attended a good sampling of other panels and went to some conference-related events of the reception and business-meeting variety. While I would appreciate it if the people who speak on Russian topics would recognize that not all Slavic/Eastern European scholars know Russian and aren't going to get much out of big chunks of spoken Russian, I suppose that this situation is unlikely to change. It did make me rather less inclined to attend panels on Russian topics and more inclined to seek out panels dealing with places whose languages are more obscure. After all, while my knowledge of Czech means I can guess at a surprising number of Russian words, I really don't follow chunks of Russian verse or film dialog.
I did, however, feel generally impressed with the quality of the papers I heard and with the professionalism of most of the chairs and discussants. I kept track of certain people whom I would be glad to have as my discussant in the future, for instance. I enjoyed learning more about such topics as post-revolution journalism, Tuzex stores and Bulgarian luxury cigarettes, Czech decadent literature, Polish fears regarding syphilis among the intelligentsia, and avant-garde Russian picture books. I met some interesting people, some of whose work I had admired, some of whom are old friends of My Sibling, and some of whom were previously complete strangers to me. And, considering that it was my first AAASS conference, I saw quite a few people I already knew.
I have not seen all that much of New Orleans, but Shawn and I did venture onto Bourbon street the night of our arrival and, along with Czech and Hungarian colleagues, drank some overpriced cocktails to the accompaniment of a good jazz band. I also joined Jesse on a couple of exploratory missions, and this afternoon the three of us sampled the legendary Cafe du Monde coffee and beignets, which met with our approval. I will be relying on their photos since I left my camera at home, but I can state that the French Quarter has recovered pretty well from Hurricane Katrina and is indeed an attractive neighborhood with courtyards, wrought-iron balconies, and appealing gardens. This evening Jesse and a Turkish grad student are off hearing jazz at Preservation Hall. I would have joined them but wasn't sure my energy was sufficient.
Meanwhile, now that I finally have internet access again (hotel #2), I have learned that my friend Travis, who will be teaching at St. Olaf next semester, was wondering whether I knew where to lay hands on reproductions of Toyen's illustrations for the Marquis de Sade's Justine, which I gather he would like to use in class. We had previously talked about various art and popular culture images he might want to use, but I hadn't realized that he was going to want to regale his students (who may, for all I know, include some of our Minnesota kin) with Justine. I admitted that I do in fact own a reprint of the book and have scanned the illustrations for my dissertation, so he can show them all if he so chooses. I will have to tell him about the Czech decadent art discussed at the final panel, which included a fine self-portrait of Karel Hlaváček in the form of a spider.
Travis is tending Ms. Spots and Orion in my absence, so he was able to assure me that they have been stealing one another's lettuce and, I suppose, offering to chew on Justine if it is left on the couch.

Weekend Work

Some people work on the weekend; some people don't. The average grad student, of course, works at pretty much any time of day or night, any day of the week, which is both an advantage and a curse (as you wish to envision it).
This weekend's task around here is to see if a journal article can actually be completed out of the mass of pieces pulled from the dissertation; the thing would have to arrive by mail by August 1 so we're looking at overnighting it even should it prove possible to finish the thing.
Of course, I have known about this journal's deadline since the middle of May. In mid-May I was trying to wrap up my Prague research; in mid-June I was presenting a paper at the Tate Modern and returning to California; in late June and early July I was trying to get a couple of chapters into something approaching a condition that my advisor would find readable. So, in late July, here we go with this project.
It is one of those eminently possible projects... it requires no new research and not a lot of utterly new text. I'd say it is close to being a real article. But will I manage to give it that glossy finish of the publishable history article? The journal in question publishes readable, interesting studies, and it would be a fine place to publish.
Well, we'll see how much more revision I can stomach. Maybe yesterday I finally got it past its major cut-and-paste reorganizing stage and can concentrate on perfecting it. One never knows quite where one is in the process until one is on to the next stage. And Toyen is probably exerting beyond-the-grave pressure to keep this in draft form.

ABBYY Scans

Since the dissertation involves quite a few different tasks besides running OCR on digital photos, and as I wasn't sure what would be the best project to test ABBYY on next (the Brouk book, while the sample page was excellent, proved to have such a tight binding that my photos were not a good beginner project), things languished a bit despite the shortening time available on the demo.
In the meantime, however, I bought a new scanner. I had given the old one to My Sibling when I went to Prague since a portable one was desired for visits to Library of Congress.
The new scanner, a CanoScan LiDE 70, is much like my previous portable scanners, although I think it is somewhat bigger and heavier. I will not pretend it is a high-end piece of equipment, but I'm pleased to note that it seems much faster than the old one. When one has a lot of scanning and/or is wrestling with heavy art books, one does not wish to spend forever holding the book to the scanner. The longer you hold it, the greater the chance of slippage.
I had borrowed a copy of the first edition of Nezval's Řetěz štěstí, which has a cover and frontispiece by Toyen. While in Prague, I had photographed the pictures and taken a quick look at the text, but I knew I could read it in the US, so I didn't get very involved with it there. Now, with the NRLF's copy at my disposal, I decided that this was a good test project.
Scanning books using Acrobat is rather tiresome since for no good reason it keeps reverting to black-and-white. It is not fun resetting the scanner software to grayscale or color for each scan. I hope this has been fixed in the newer versions of Acrobat.
Scanning with ABBYY, however, went very smoothly once I got it to recognize the new scanner, which took much longer than I thought should have been the case. One has the choice of using either ABBYY's interface or the scanner's; allegedly there are advantages either way. I decided to go with the scanner's interface.
Řetěz štěstí is not a particularly long book and it was small enough to scan as spreads. The NRLF copy was ideal for scanning, in that it was neither in bad shape nor so pristine as to provoke fears of damaging it. It had the original binding rather than one of those dreadful library bindings that are so tight the reader can barely open the book. (I returned the NRLF copy of a Květoslav Chvatík book because it was too tight to bother trying to read. Some other library will doubtless have a better copy. I meant to tell the librarian it ought to be rebound, but forgot.)
ABBYY creates thumbnails on the left of the screen as one scans, which is reassuring. This gives some idea whether one has inadvertently done a really bad scan, or if the settings need to be adjusted.
After about an hour, Řetěz štěstí was scanned, but of course that was only the beginning. The OCR part was next. I had set it to recognize and flip everything right side up, which it did nicely. I did not time this phase, but while it seemed longish, it wasn't terribly and in any case I didn't have to sit at the computer and watch it run. Some rabbit petting was accomplished, which vastly pleased Calypso Spots.
The longest and most tedious phase was that of checking the text. Since I was going to save the scans as a PDF with the recognized text "underneath," this was not absolutely necessary, but I decided to see how accurate my results were.
The original book being neither tight nor spotty, there were not too many instances of random dots and splotches being read as possible text, and the letters near the gutter didn't suffer too much. On the whole, ABBYY did a very good job of recognizing the text correctly; most of what it flagged as questionable was actually perfectly correct, although there were enough errors that I was definitely improving the accuracy by checking the result. This was most significant in that, for reasons utterly unknown to me, ABBYY seemed to believe that Štyrský was actually spelled with two long Ys rather than just one. Štyrský is mentioned rather often in the text and his name had to be corrected every time.
The other notable thing about checking the result was the discovery of just how much Czech spelling has changed since 1936 and how much richer Nezval's vocabulary was than the ABBYY dictionary. Since most of what I read in Czech is from before 1940, I don't normally think much about how it is spelled. This exercise, however, really brought home why many of the words I look up aren't to be found in my electronic dictionary. Czech spelling claims to be phonetic, and on the whole it is, but let's just say it's often hard to tell whether something is spelled with an S or a Z. Quite a few words seem to have gone from an S spelling to a Z spelling. Words that once had an E often now have an A, which explains why ArtificiElismus is now spelled ArtificiAlismus.
As is customary with OCR software, there is the option of adding new words to the dictionary, but I decided not to get involved in trying to add a lot of Czech words, so I hit the Ignore All button a lot.
This is not the sort of project that the sane person undertakes in one sitting, so I did various other things during the day. All the same, I did finish before it got dark out. I now have a very nice searchable, annotatable PDF of Řetěz štěstí to read at my leisure.
Next in line is Benayoun's Erotique du surréalisme, which should go faster since it is in French and mostly pictures. I had been looking for this for years before finding it, which is mystifying as apparently it has belonged to UC Berkeley for ages. Their online catalog is not fully reliable, I fear. I don't know how many books I've searched for on title and gotten null results, only to re-search on author and get the listing immediately. (I only discovered this simple trick this summer.)

Repulsively Appropriate

Right when I had the big Toyen catalog open to this painting, a little red TICK began racing along the page.
Since Czech ticks carry serious diseases that I'm not immunized for, they make me uneasy. I immediately squashed the tick in the book.
Well, evidently the tick was full of somebody's blood. There's now a blood spot on the reproduction.
I suppose the bat in the painting (Frequently Strewn Sheets, 1959) is meant to be a vampire bat, so future readers of the library's copy of this book will just have to suppose the bat got a little messy while dining amidst the sheets.

Fashions of 1909

I had been meaning to post some images from Damske modni listy, but now that BibliOdyssey has put up Hungarian fashions of the 1870s, I think I should cease procrastinating. Not that my hover-over-the-desk photography of these exactly rivals the Hungarians' high-quality reproductions and that special BibliOdyssey knack for removing stains and gunk, but all the same the two posts do sort of go together.
My excuse for examining Damske modni listy in the first place was that I had a reference to it in one of my sources. After all, the obsessive dissertation writer does not wish to clutter the final product with too many "quoted in" and "cited in" footnotes.
To my surprise and dismay, the bound volume was missing precisely the issue I wanted, but I think we might say that it more than compensated with its wealth of representations of French fashion available to the interested Czech female.



The more I looked, the more it hit me that this was good research, not just eye-candy (although it is unquestionably that).



The surrealists (both French and Czech) often used imagery from their childhoods in collages and related works. While Max Ernst was perhaps the pioneer in this arena, Toyen also made use of imagery taken from and reflecting this time period. She was seven years old when these came out.



Aren't these skirts-without-bodies a bit surreal? They certainly seem more so than the photos of skirts-without-bodies I recall from the Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs I used to cut up when I was seven.



The hats are quite remarkable in their own way, but what about those bodices?



After a certain amount of exposure to the girls in this publication, it becomes clear why Toyen put girls with jumpropes into her work. Girls with hoops show up equally often in the magazine, but I think Toyen must not have been much inclined to play with hoops. Not surprising. The jumprope has endured, the hoop rapidly became something of a curiosity.



I confess I do find it difficult to imagine Toyen wearing one of these hats even at the age of seven.



Unrelated to surrealist imagery, these last few are costumes, in case it is not obvious.

Year-End Roundup of Interesting Posts

It is that time of year when magazines and news programs like to compile their lists of the "best" of everything. While I would not say that I exactly have a Ten Best list, it has occurred to me that the 2005-2006 Fulbright blogs of my acquaintance (along with Julia’s Kolo Kolo blog) have now been underway for long enough that there is a lot of material to go through if you have not been reading them regularly. Consequently, I felt prompted to pick out some favorites and/or items that struck me as particularly likely to interest my readers, and so here they are in a vaguely thematic arrangement, perhaps forming a sort of anthology. (Naturally, these are not the only worthwhile bits, but I could not include everything.)

Photo Essays
You can get into the mood for a trip to the Czech Republic with Jen and Deborah’s photos, of which these are some choice samples :
Jen, week of September 4th
Jen, week of October 2nd
Deborah: Favorite winter prague sites

Architecture and Cityscapes
These posts will give the armchair traveler a more architectural and urban view of Moscow and the Czech Republic:
From Kylowna:
I AM IN LOVE!!!!!!!
From Deborah:
Watching the world from my Ostrovni neighborhood
From Kristen:
Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Blog
Strange Phenomena
From Jesse:
The Walls of Communism
Waiting for the Tram, Functionally Speaking
Some People Can Make a Bar Out of Anything
Žďár nad Sázavou
From this blog:
Days of the Dead
The Café Life
The Villa Tugendhat (mostly)
The Žďár nad Sázavou Adventure (Part II)

What Life is Like (for some of us)
Here are some posts relating to our experiences of life abroad. As you will have noticed, each of us has our own extremely individual outlook and favorite sorts of topics. I’m afraid I mostly left out posts about holidays since there have been so many in the last three months.
From Deborah:
views to the bridges
City comparisons
From Kylowna:
Day of the Dead--Nov 2
From Kristen:
I Love Her, I Love Her Not
The "Wild" Dogs of Moscow
Rain and Other Gloomy Things
Banya!
Transportation
On Kopecks
Perspective
From Jesse:
Tram Culture 101: Tickets and Customs
Bad Karma, or Karmic Heat Wave?
From this blog:
The Good
More Signs of Apparent Czechness
Vánoční trhy 2005
Lower Your Phone Bill! (Yeah, Right...)
From Julia:
The foggy season, or "smutné" times in Prague
Not from around here - double locked doors
St. Martin on a white horse - winter rides in
Just don’t call him that - the slippery slope of house shoe parlance
Mikulaš eve, Celebrating St. Nicholas in Prague

Language
Of course, there are many aspects to daily life, and the struggle to become fluent in Slavic languages is on our minds more than we really like to admit:
From Jesse:
České jazykolamy
From Julia:
Pronunciation – Help!

Laundry
Laundry and its intricacies could not be left out:
From Kristen:
The Joy of Laundry
From this blog:
Laundry

Adventures Shopping
Shopping is another of those things we often try to avoid thinking too much about (although you will note that posts under other topics also deal with our efforts to purchase this and that). It appears that I found the most striking discussions of shopping on Kristen’s blog, although I know I have also had my say here and there, as have Jesse and Julia:
The IKEA Adventure (and then some)
Searching in All the Wrong Places
Warm Fuzzies?
My Shopping Bag
Orenburg Lace

Food and Adventures in Dining
The most important thing one generally shops for, of course, is food. At times we find food in restaurants, and at times we bring home the raw ingredients and actually cook. The latter can be quite a challenge, and our blogs have many more intriguing posts about cooking than I could bring myself to list.
From Kristen:
Bovine Dining
Vinigret
Notes on Russian Cuisine
From Jesse:
The Adventure of the Peanut Butter Cookies
Nudli 3: Brno Hybrid
From this blog:
And Now We Celebrate
From Julia:
Find a turkey, track down that yam: Thanksgiving in Prague

Products and Their Display
While food is not everything, it is the primary subject of these amusing examples of packaging. Kristen also has some excellent photos of Russian products tucked away in posts about other topics.
From Kristen:
Fattening Up the Ranks--Via Capitalism and Otherwise
No Comment
Red October
From Jesse:
Nudli 1: Dej si "Superpauzu"
Cat Got Your Tongue?
Does Your Beverage Match?
Ancient Czech Blend
Big Americans

Concerts and Film
And, of course, we live not by bread alone, nor even by ingeniously packaged chocolates. From time to time we go out and attend performances and shows of one sort or another.
From Jesse:
"Bronze Reverberations of Gongs": Czech Gamelan
Morava: The Concert
Moravian Girl on the Town
From this blog:
Toyen in Film
Premiere of the New Švankmajer Film

Politics and Sociological Observations
At times we also analyze what’s going on out there.
From Kristen:
Genes
From Jesse:
The Eve of Tomorrow
The "Czech Family" in Crisis, and Other News of the Weird
Music and Protest
"Czech" Verbuňk Recognized by UNESCO

Curiosities
And, ahem, some of us take particular pleasure in finding, discussing, and/or inventing weird stuff (you will have gotten a taste of this in the product packaging section). It was difficult to keep this section to a manageable size. My blog has much more weirdness than this, and Kristen’s has no shortage either. Jesse, however, has written up quite a few individual bits of weirdness, so he gets many links here.
From Jesse:
Another Plus for Brno
The Fashion Police is Out
More Czech News: Are We Living in a Tabloid?
Those Prams Again!
Dear Little Jesus: Have You Seen My Kitchen Lately?
No Posting!
Pizza, Go Home!
From this blog:
We Speak with Guests
Hospodářské noviny and the Case of the Roman Bikini

Research
Last but not really least, some of us do write about our work. Deborah, Jen, and Kylowna actually say quite a bit about their work, but it is spread all over their blogs and I did not really see any very specific posts that gave the full flavor. (In truth, I’m not convinced that my own readers are all dying to see photos of Jen and Kylowna’s students and co-workers, excellent though these may be in their own way.)
From Kristen:
Archive Blindness
From Jesse:
Music, Anyone?
You Play a What?
From this blog:
Explanations
More About Nezval
Figuring Out Handwriting
The Archival Life
Bohuslav Brouk
The Library Life

Filed under:
Prague Brno Moscow Czech architecture food shopping Toyen Nezval surrealism research art music blogs

Toyen in Film

The new Toyen film by Jan Němec premiered here November 2. Alas, I was not able to get in to the premiere to hear Němec introduce the film, but I did manage to catch the November 9 showing at Bio Oko, along with Alex and her friend Tom. (No, this movie is not showing daily in every multiplex in Prague.)
It is a rather difficult film to describe. Is it a documentary? Is it a surrealist work in itself? A bit of both. Silent actors play the roles of Toyen, Jindřich Heisler, and Jindřich Štyrský in vignettes collaged with photos of the artists themselves and images of some of their works, interspersed with footage of neighborhoods where Toyen and Heisler lived in Prague and Paris, amateur footage shot by the artists themselves, and documentary footage of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and of the postwar show trial of surrealist sympathizer Zaviš Kalandra (who was executed by the Communist regime). The narration provides both factual and poetic background.
This film is clearly intended for an audience familiar with Toyen’s art and life. For viewers who know nothing of Toyen or interwar Czech surrealism, like Alex and Tom, it is a visually and auditorily rich mystery. Even a viewer fluent in Czech (but otherwise ignorant) would not get a clear sense of who these artists were, other than that Toyen hid Heisler from the Nazis. For a viewer familiar with Toyen’s life, the film is beautiful and intriguing but prompts questions about its focus and the portrayal of Toyen herself.
It’s possible that Němec has captured an aspect of Toyen unknown to me. Each of us builds our own images of specific historical figures, which may come solely from PR, the evening news, or our own romanticizing. The image that comes through my research is one of a person whose external persona was much more down-to-earth than her imagination. I encounter a Toyen who had many friends despite being somewhat reserved, who was an extraordinarily prolific and respected artist, who handled her business affairs sensibly, who was courageous in her actions and beliefs, and who always, in Nezval’s diaries, appears to do her part and is never (unlike Štyrský or Makovský) late or a no-show. In my research, Toyen also comes across as a person who rejected stereotypical gender roles and baffled her friends by speaking in the male gender and by presenting herself in what we might now refer to as both butch and femme modes of dress, while nonetheless attracting quite a few of her male comrades (of whom it is unclear how many, if any, she was willing to accept as sexual partners). The film, however, emphasizes Toyen as feminine and presents her not just as Heisler’s lover but also as a sort of vague, mystically self-absorbed person who spent much of her time obsessively tracing shapes on mirrors. This image may be just as true as the Toyen I encounter in historical documents; the Toyen I find in documents is, after all, unquestionably not the internal Toyen.
But in a sense, the film revolves more around Heisler than Toyen herself. Toyen is, in a sense, defined via Heisler in this film. The action (if it can be called such) focuses on the period during which the two were close, almost ignoring her twenty-year artistic partnership with Štyrský and giving the impression that after Heisler’s premature death in 1953, Toyen’s life consisted of painting and waiting to die. What? It’s unquestionable that Heisler, her second and much younger artistic partner, was of enormous importance to her, and very likely his death left a great hole in her life (they had gone into exile together), but the body of work she created in the 27 years after his death shows that there was still plenty going on somewhere inside her. An artist who avoided writing anything personal of her own, Toyen preferred the company of writers, and after the deaths of Štyrský and Heisler (both of whom were both visual artists and writers), she made new friends within the French surrealist group.
I also had the odd feeling that the portrayal of Toyen and Heisler owes more to the practices of the postwar Czechoslovak surrealists than to those of the original group. The postwar Czechoslovak surrealists kept their group alive underground. There is something hermetic about them. The original group, however, mostly began their careers in the twenties in Devětsil, with huge and public optimism. These surrealists met openly, in cafes, and told everyone what they were doing until the Nazis rolled in and put them in daily fear. And this is the point, really, where the film begins—this shift to the secret, muffled, underground life.
The point, I think, is not to take this film as a documentary that will somehow reveal all about Toyen. Toyen didn’t want all revealed, none of us will succeed in revealing all her secrets, and it was not the director’s intent to tell her life story or analyze her intentions. Take the film as a meditation inspired by a portion of her life, just a portion, and that introduces only small bits, impressions, of the outside world that she was a part of.

Some links about the film or about Toyen and Czech film more broadly:
A look on the Web suggests that Argo is publishing a book on the film.
For those who read Czech, Novinky.cz has an article on the film, with reader discussion way at the bottom of the page. They have another article here.
See also České noviny; the Czech BBC (note on the far right the reference to the recent death of Czech surrealist Eva Švankmajerová).
The Association of Czech Film Clubs gives further information (don’t be fooled by the “English” link at the top, there is no English text); also Tiscali.cz; iDnes.cz; Lidovky.cz.
České filmové nebe gives basics on the production.
Houser.cz shows a different still than most.
And, According to Český rozhlas, an earlier film about Toyen exists (this article is in French).
Read about the director at Literárky v Síti.
Read about Czech films in general in the Czech Film Center’s English-language newsletter; and another issue of it.
Finally, the 1966 short film Anxiety was inspired by Toyen’s paintings (I have not seen this film).

Explanations

I realize that this blog has existed much too long without an explanation of what I am doing in Prague and, for that matter, who all these Fulbright people are.
Those of you who know me (which I assume to be the vast majority of my readers; I have no illusions about attracting thousands of strangers to this site) will mostly have at least some vague notion that I’ve been working on my PhD in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. My reasons for that are perhaps best left unexamined, but boredom with office temp work as a means of supporting the fiction-writing habit did figure into it. In any case, my advisor thought I would do better to pursue my interest in the Czech surrealist Toyen than to try to write yet another dissertation on the Weimar Republic, and this has worked out very well. Toyen and the interwar Czech avant-garde seem to be of perpetual interest to me, even if it could be argued that I’ve bought into the mythologization of the First Republic as a golden age. But—what the heck, just because the First Republic wasn’t actually perfect (what is?) doesn’t mean it wasn’t awfully interesting.
So… the dissertation itself looks at the construction of gender and eroticism in the work of Toyen (Marie Čermínová). I use the word “construction” because Toyen creates her own version of these things (as do we all, to some extent) and why/how is her version different from what other (mostly male) surrealists came up with? (I am trying not to sound painfully academic here, and not really succeeding, as it is, after all, a PhD dissertation.) Perhaps I should give in to academic language here and give the abstract I wrote for the Fulbright-Hays DDRA grant (which is funding me this year):
“This dissertation situates the life and work of the artist Toyen (1902-1980), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, within the larger discourses of modernism and feminism/gender studies. In particular, it will explicate Toyen’s construction of eroticism and gender within the contexts of early twentieth century Czech feminism, the interwar Prague avant-garde, and Prague and Paris surrealism. As a case study of one artist working within a specific avant-garde movement, this project contributes to critical re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, thereby critiquing the reductive East-West binary that currently shapes English-language discourse about Central and Eastern European art.”
I hope that wasn’t too painful for most of you, and satisfies to some extent the desire some of you have expressed to hear more about my research. Each fall PhD students all across North America write rafts of grant proposals in the hope of getting someone or other to fund their research (assuming that their departments are not funding them eternally), and some of us actually succeed in getting the funding; the three proposals I turned in last fall were abnormally successful and resulted in three offers of funding (FLAS, Fulbright, and Fulbright-Hays DDRA), of which I had to pick only one, namely Fulbright-Hays. Many people have heard of Fulbright, but few have heard of Fulbright-Hays DDRA, which is a related but less broadly defined program that only funds PhD candidates who plan to teach and whose research is focused on certain parts of the globe. Thus, this year there are seven Fulbright Students in the Czech Republic and somewhat more Fulbright Scholars plus some Fulbright Teachers, while there is one Fulbright-Hays professor (Bruce) and I am the only Fulbright-Hays DDRA here. Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays are administered by separate governmental entities, but the Prague Fulbright office does provide some services to Fulbright-Hays recipients, such as inviting us to orientation and events.
Now: my partners in crime, or, that is, the other grantees. I confess that I didn’t really get to know the Fulbright Scholars and Teachers at orientation, because we only shared parts of the process. The Scholars and Teachers are not required to know Czech or to be experts on the Czech Republic, but merely have some reason for wanting to work with Czech colleagues on projects. (This is not to say that it is easy to get one of those Fulbright grants; I am really very ignorant about their side of things.) The Fulbright Students, however, generally have to have a decent command of the language and to have an interesting project to pursue here. This year two of the Student slots were reserved for Teaching Assistants, of whom I only met one, Justin. The other students are Alex, Dawn, Hubert, Jesse, and Vivian, and I expect them to appear regularly on this blog. By some miracle, we are all arts/humanities types, so we have closely related interests.
Alex has her MFA from American University (where I obtained my MA) and is studying Czech puppet animation, notably the work of Jiří Trnka. She is acquainting herself with various puppet animators and has an affiliation here with FAMU (the film school).
Dawn is completing her PhD at University of Toronto, on a contemporary German-language Czech author whose name I have forgotten. In a past life she was a flautist.
Hubert is a composer and has just finished his PhD at UC Berkeley, so his project is to compose something here and have it performed. His affiliation is with HAMU (the music school).
The reason Jesse has already appeared so frequently in this blog is that we already knew each other, having been in Czech class together last summer. We met at the picnic table at school the first morning, ended up in the same class, and spent the next month roaming around Prague and lunching with our classmates Ross, Martin, and Grisha. Jesse is a musicology student at University of Michigan and is writing his dissertation about Moravian cimbalom bands.
Vivian received her BA from Harvard and is working on a project relating to the nineteenth-century artist Brožík. I gather it has a historical fiction component, which sounds intriguing.
Bruce is the other Fulbright-Hays recipient. He teaches history at Calvin in Michigan and is working on a Czech-Slovenian architectural project at the moment. Or perhaps not really at the moment, as his wife Megan just gave birth to their fourth child and I’m sure his thoughts are more on that this week.
I think that is enough for now about all of us. The archival life calls. (As do the unfinished grant proposals for next year, but more faintly.)