Graduation

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


Kristen and I standing around awaiting our parents.


Kristen's parents arrived first.


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


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


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


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

Spring Arrives, Sort Of

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

Win Some, Lose Some?

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

On the Positive Side...

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

Diligence Isn't Enough

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

Sylvia Sleigh, Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, 1977

Immersed?

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

Things That Don't Work as Expected

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

Busy or Just Wasting Time?

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.

Inauguration Day

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

And on to Philadelphia...

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

Defense Scheduled and All That

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

On Correspondence

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

Architecture, Film, Posters, and More!

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

Election Day Arrives

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.

Nostalgic Odors

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

Fortuna Speaks

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

Economic Meltdown?

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

Say What? The Perils of Dress

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.