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.

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.

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!

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.

Summer Heat Comes Our Way

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

On Holiday Time (or not)

While the rest of the world (mostly) has gone back to work, my brain is still largely on holiday time, which means my mind is on food, conversation, walks, and other simple pleasures. Thus, the leek-and-potato soup was made and has partly been eaten (there was a lot of it), I won a game of Scrabble, and Jesse and I watched Divoké včely and Pupendo. (Which I should describe, but am too holiday-like to bother.) This afternoon we decided to finish off the pie before Jesse caught the train (or bus, as the case may be) back to Brno.
Unfortunately I seem to have allowed a chip of plum pit into the pie; there was a great CRUNCH and next thing I knew, I felt quite certain that I had cracked yet another tooth.
This put a damper on my mood, as it seemed much more significant than the piece I had lost before Christmas and was planning to have fixed in the New Year.
I had to decide where to take my crumbling mouth. My mental preference was to go to an ordinary Czech dentist of some sort, but on an emotional level this just didn’t work. I can’t stand novocaine, which seems to exacerbate any existing pain rather than numbing it, and I’ve been going to the same dentist since I graduated from college. I felt an English-language dentist was required.
And so, I’ve been to the dentist and learned—just as I suspected—that I finally have to get a crown. She was a little skeptical of going without anesthetic, but when I told her that I had had nearly all my fillings done without it and had a wisdom tooth pulled in the same manner, she said we could give it a try.
We will see if I can manage not to break any more teeth before I go in for my crown on Friday.

Filed under:
Prague Czech

Silvestr at Karla's House of Pleasure

New Year’s Eve is celebrated in the Czech Republic much as in the United States, but by the name of Silvestr. A great many people do nothing in particular beyond staying home and watching TV (endless Silvestr specials featuring every Czech entertainer imaginable, with flashbacks to Silvestr specials from the distant past). Other people, however, go out to restaurants and parties and suchlike. I gather that Staroměstské náměstí and Václavské náměstí become a seething mass of international drunkenness.
It occurred to Jesse and me, however, that New Year’s Eve would be an ideal time to prepare another feast in my kitchen. After a visit to the grocery stores for ideas, I formulated a menu of leek and potato soup, roasted vegetables, risotto, cranberry sauce, and a plum, apple, and cranberry pie. Several other Fulbright grantees were bound to be available to join us (as indeed they were).
The soup was put off on the grounds that it looked like there would be a massive amount of food without it, but everything else went together without any problem, despite the fact that Jesse’s train was delayed significantly (permitting him to watch a dog fight at the Brno train station and consider acquiring Jehovah’s Witness information on Armageddon to pass the time). When he arrived, I put him in charge of the pie crust as presumably this one would not self-destruct (it did not).
Dawn was the first guest to arrive, as she had another engagement to attend, so round one of the dinner was eaten.
Shortly after her departure, Hubert arrived. He had been slaving over a string quartet and required a break from the rigors of composition, so I began to tell him about the interesting museum Megan and I had visited the previous day.
Megan then called from the tram stop for further directions, so, as my hands were covered with plum, Hubert picked up the phone. “Karla’s House of Pleasure,” said he. (Megan had to give the rest of the details of the museum herself.)
Phase two of dinner was successful and suitably merry. Jesse had found a remarkable volume in a Brno bookstore, the Hudební atlas hub (musical atlas of mushrooms), whose author has composed music for each of numerous types of mushroom. We examined this singular work and also played selections from the accompanying CD. Unfortunately the CD player on my laptop was being a little finicky, but the pieces sounded listenable.
Hubert had brought along some DVDs, so we then watched Kalamita, an older Věra Chytilová film starring the ever-popular Bolek Polívka. It was pretty good, although I gather it was very different from some of the director’s other films. The ending was a bit dull in comparison to the rest.
At that point, it seemed about time to head over to Vyšehrad, which Věra had told me was a popular place for less crazy Silvestr celebrations. The Vyšehrad fortifications are about a mile north of my apartment—a nice walk, generally. There was a bit of precipitation of the rain (versus snow) variety, but not enough to warrant umbrellas. Some of the streets in Podolí had Christmas decorations up, and as we approached Vyšehrad we came across others headed in the same direction.
Up on the ramparts there were lots of people looking out over the city, many of them shooting off fireworks. I am really not accustomed to being in close range of fireworks, but on the whole I felt much safer than I would have expected, as the fireworks (many of them the kind I would only expect to see at a municipal display) were mostly set off into the distance. People on other high ground around Prague were doing the same, so the show was quite impressive until fog and smoke took over the atmosphere. Even then, it was still worth watching. People were animated but, as Věra had indicated, not wildly out of control.
Decorations in Podoli

Fireworks on the way up to Vyšehrad

Up at Vyšehrad

The police watch fireworks

When we began to head back, we found that the cobblestones had gotten really icy. While we made it safely back to my apartment, the journey was a bit hazardous and there were a few falls and near-misses.
Under these circumstances, it seemed pointless for Hubert to go home, so I had three overnight guests. This certainly called for prompt deployment of Hovoříme s hostem, but I didn’t think of that, merely of which bedding I could bring forth. (I am glad that Sandra owns what would usually appear to be a surplus of pillows and pillow cases, so no one had to go without these.) The living-room supply of Cosmopolitan provided bedtime reading matter for those who had not brought their own or who were not in the mood for volume 3 of Karel Teige’s writings on art.
In the morning, I fed my guests coffee, tea, and a ten-egg omelet or frittata (there was some discussion as to which it was). Hubert proved to be a most meticulous onion-slicer.
Megan told us that she had run across a blog with a photo of a most peculiar fountain, which we agreed we ought to make a resolution to find and photograph that very day. Megan was able to find the blog with the photo, but no precise address was given. There was, however, a link to the artist’s website—it proved, not surprisingly (to me), to be a recent work by the Prague sculptor David Černý. (Černý is one of the best-known contemporary sculptors here, and does pretty interesting and often satirical stuff. I got to hear him talk about his work when my Czech course visited him in 2003. On the whole, I like what he does. He is especially known for having painted a statue of a Soviet tank pink.) We thought that as it sounded like the sculpture was on the Kampa, we could probably find it.
Off we went. The Kampa is not large, although it is somewhat labyrinthine. We explored the section south of the Charles Bridge exhaustively without finding any sign of our quarry. Perhaps it was simply in greater Malá Strana and not on the Kampa. We left the Kampa and found Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, which met with our approval. We then saw another sign for Kampa and followed it. Eventually, in the courtyard of the new Kafka Museum (I am not sure how many Kafka Museums there now are in Prague), we found our statue. Unfortunately, it being winter, the fountain and mechanical parts were not in use. We did, however, take quite a few pictures, after which it seemed like time for more food.
After this meal, Hubert decided it was time to return to his string quartet, and the rest of us met up with Dawn to watch Corpse Bride in Smíchov. The tickets were exorbitantly priced, but the movie was rather fun.
Megan really did have to get back to Kutná Hora, so after bidding Dawn adieu, Jesse and I accompanied her to the Hlavní nádraží. We did this not because Megan cannot get to the train station by herself, but because the three of us had formulated a plan for anthropological observation of the train station’s clientele. Not the ordinary travelers, of course, but the seedy characters who spend lots of time there. On this expedition, however, we did not see anything too remarkable. One homeless person had brought his own lawn chair to sit on, which I expect was more comfortable than the slab his companions were seated on. Unfortunately capitalism has brought its evils as well as its benefits to the Czech Republic, and thus there are now homeless people who need a warm place to stay on winter nights.
We are not very thorough anthropologists, however, so shortly after Megan’s departure Jesse and I returned to my apartment and watched Balada pro banditu. This classic musical was filmed in the 1970s and is still performed as a stage play (See Jesse's review of a recent instance) but neither of us had seen the film. While the story is set in Ruthenia during the First Republic, the film has a rather sweet and very 1970s counterculture ambience. Even with the English subtitles, I thought most of the plot and exposition had evaporated; without Jesse’s greater knowledge of the story, I would have been baffled. At the same time, we found it very enjoyable to watch and listen to. It has a nonrealistic, poetic atmosphere (imagine Robin Hood and his Merry Men out in the forest, but at a 1970s Renaissance Faire), and Bolek Polívka gives a memorable performance as Mageri the Jew. It made a pleasant end for New Year’s Day and the music at the end of the DVD loops so skillfully and is so lulling that there is no need to turn it off immediately, especially if (as is normally the case in my living room here) the film is being watched by candlelight. You can just sit there and watch the candle flames and listen. Thoughts of archival research have retreated far into the back of the mind, as should generally be the case over the holidays.
(And now: you are growing v e r y s l e e p y…)

The water wheel at the Kampa

Note: You can see a photo Dawn took of us here.
And Jesse has now written about Silvestr, also with photos.
And Megan also writes about Silvestr, using some familiar photos.

Filed under:
Prague Czech food film holidays art music blogs

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

The Museum of Sex Machines

On one of Megan’s earlier visits to Prague, we happened to pass by the Museum of Sex Machines, which is so conveniently located just off Staroměstské náměstí, and formulated the plan that at some post-Christmas date we would have to see what sort of nonsense it contained. As it was obviously a tourist trap, we did not have very high hopes that it would offer more than kitsch value (something that would have offended that pornophilia advocate Bohuslav Brouk greatly; if there was one thing that offended interwar avant-gardists, it was kitsch, although then as now, kitsch could be employed to make art, and Brouk and Toyen’s friend Jindřich Štyrský was very good at doing that). But sometimes kitsch is amusing in itself.
The entrance fees were certainly beyond those of any other Czech museum in my recollection, and there was no student discount posted.
The ground floor, to our surprise, seemed to be devoted to not particularly erotic forms of undergarment, which were very humorously displayed. Socks seemed to be the main attraction, along with antimasturbatory garments. We did not think these really qualified as machines, but then we were hoping that “machines” would be interpreted loosely, as it was. A back room proved to have footage from Spanish films of the 1920s, of which the museum appeared to be very proud, and which we and the other patrons watched with, yet again, considerable amusement. Actually, I was especially surprised how much footage had survived, as we watched quite a bit before getting bored and moving on.
The “machines” of the museum’s title were mostly items that were rather difficult to imagine the precise use of, even with descriptions. We were not really all that sure why the Italians needed special tables for people to recline on, for example. Then again, there were other, more simple, items that are in fairly widespread use. On the whole, we did not think we had any personal need for most of the items on display, but it is always interesting to know what people are inventing and why they believe it ought to be patented.

Megan acquaints herself with one of the stocking displays.

The garment itself (or possibly a replica) was also displayed, but this seemed more informative.

This was the cause of considerable hilarity. I would like to know whether anyone actually bought and wore this product.

We weren't entirely sure where the human body belonged in this, but it seemed like something one might find in a surrealist exhibition instead. Things did get weirder as we went up the stairs.

Note: Megan writes about the experience here.

Filed under:
Prague Czech surrealism research sex

Books for Sale!

In general, it is not my purpose in this blog to sell anything (in fact, my grant prohibits my engaging in money-making activities), but it occurs to me that a few readers might be interested in a volume currently available on Half.com.
My friend and former tutor Štěpanka Korytová-Magstadt is not just one of the human companions of the inimitable Vegetka (see earlier), but is the author of a well-regarded text on Czech immigration to the Midwest, To Reap a Bountiful Harvest. If you have Czech ancestry, or are interested in immigrant/migration studies, you will want to own this book. We are selling brand-new copies of the paperback edition for $14.95 plus shipping. The full $14.95 goes to Štěpanka.

Filed under:
Czech research books

Christmas in Western Bohemia

As I noted earlier, Štěpanka invited Jesse and me to spend Christmas with her and Michael in their village cottage.
It is important to explain, before I go any further, that the Czech relationship between city and country is somewhat different than the American. Not wholly different, but different all the same. As in the United States, many urban Czechs were brought up in small towns or rural areas; unlike in the United States, most of them make regular visits (often weekly or monthly) to the relatives back home. Conversely, many Czechs born in the larger cities have little cottages to which they retire nearly every weekend. This means that from about 2:00 each Friday until about noon on Saturday the outward-bound buses are packed with Czechs heading out of the cities. They then return sometime after noon on Sunday.
Štěpanka not only has a cottage in a village, but lives there year-round and commutes in to Plzeň and Prague to teach. Her son Michael used to attend the local schools but now spends the weekdays in Prague with his grandmother so that he can go to a more academically demanding school there. Thus, on Fridays he joins the outbound migration.
As the Friday buses were expected to be even more packed than usual, Štěpanka advised that Jesse and I pay a bit more and take the train to Plzeň, from whence we could catch a local bus. This worked splendidly, as the train was only moderately full.
The plan was that we would look around Plzeň a bit while waiting for our bus, as Jesse had never been there and I had not seen anything but the bus station since about 1990, but this didn’t really work out as I had an overnight bag filled with presents and root vegetables, and furthermore, we had stayed up too late the night before to get a very early start. (Something about it getting dark around 4:30 makes it much easier for me to stay up until midnight or 3am than is normally my custom.) However, we thought the main square in Plzeň was quite attractive, and its Vánoční trh looked more varied than those in Prague. I remembered that there used to be an interesting museum of local folk culture on the square, but we didn’t find it, so we devoted our time to eating and coffee-drinking instead. The trip to the village itself was longish but uneventful. (In daylight, and if the bus windows are clean, the scenery is pretty.)
Czech Christmas customs are similar to North American, but not precisely the same. Of course, as in the United States, each family has slightly different traditions. Štěpanka, for instance, is not exactly religious but does like to attend (non-midnight) mass at the village church (a handsome baroque structure designed by that energetic architect Dienzenhofer). During most of the year, there are about four people in attendance there, but we noticed that the holiday upped the count to at least twenty, about half of whom were children under the age of seven who were going to sing carols for us after the service. The mass was said in Czech, and the priest enunciated very nicely, so I was disappointed that echoes and rustling noises made it harder for me to follow what he said; I tend to do very well listening to things like lectures and mass because the subject matter is clearly defined and I can put my full attention onto listening rather than half on listening and half on worrying what to say in response. From time to time I was able to find where we were in the printed booklet, but only from time to time, as the booklet only seemed to cover parts of the ceremony.
The standard Christmas Eve dish here is carp, which (if the family is really traditional) is bought live shortly before Christmas, kept in the bathtub, and then slaughtered by whoever has the nerve. (I meant to photograph the carp tubs, but didn’t, so you can see them on Julia’s blog.) These days, many families are not wild about keeping a live carp in the tub and having to slaughter it. Věra told me that in recent years, a lot of people bought live carp to entertain the children but then released the fish into the Vltava rather than killing it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the carp couldn’t tolerate so many changes of water in such a short period (they normally live not in the Vltava but in placid rybníky), so the Vltava was filled with dead carp, hardly the ecological solution these families had in mind. It sounds as though many people have now switched to having either chicken or to buying their carp pre-killed, or having someone come over and kill it. Štěpanka does not kill her own carp, and it was sliced up in the refrigerator by the time we arrived. Once it was taken out, it was guarded zealously by Vegetka, who clearly expected to get some (she did, eventually).
Our Christmas Eve dinner, then, consisted of fried carp (very good) and potato salad. Potato salad is a traditional side dish, but some families have other dishes instead of potato salad (I think with peas, but I’ve forgotten what exactly). After dinner, we opened presents and listened to some Christmas music. Some of the traditional Christmas music here is the same as what one would hear in the US, but most of it is different; I would say that the shared music seems to be primarily that of German origin. Also, instead of Händel’s Messiah, the standard classical work performed is Jakub Jan Ryba’s Christmas Mass.
On Christmas Day, Jesse and I were in charge of the food apart from that Štěpanka had acquired a goose. Štěpanka had cooked a goose once before and none of the rest of us had any experience at all in cooking large birds, so the goose was her part. It is a pretty traditional main dish for Christmas Day, but obviously not one eaten every year in all households.
My own family does not have any required holiday dishes, but we do often have cranberry sauce and baked sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, so when I ran across a bag of Ocean Spray cranberries and a bin of yams at the grocery store, I had not hesitated to nab them. The checkout clerk examined the yams with curiosity and inquired if they were potatoes, a bit sweet. I said that they were. Another employee, an African Czech, happened to be near, and so he told us “Jsou naše brambory” (they’re our potatoes). I agreed and said they are delicious. I was tempted to ask just where he came from, but was afraid that if I did, it would turn out he had been born in Prague. Besides, the line behind me was too long to engage in an extended conversation about yams or Africa. (Nor do I know why yams, which are African, and sweet potatoes, which are South American, cook up exactly the same.)
Anyhow, I had volunteered that Jesse and I, being fond of cooking, could make some things like mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, and perhaps a pie. Once the yams appeared on the scene, the mashed potatoes were given up, but we still had one of the pumpkins Jesse had been given back in October, and it was still good, so we had brought it and various other foodstuffs.
I must note that Czech ovens are not typically as large as American ovens. This is generally not a problem; one only really notices the difference when trying to bake large or multiple items. Štěpanka’s oven, moreover, is smaller than many. This made for a slight logistical problem in that the goose required the entire oven for several hours while the yams needed perhaps half an hour, the roasted vegetables needed in theory at least twenty minutes but in practice more like fifty, and the pie also needed to be baked (both the pumpkin slices and the filled pie). We handled this by starting with the pumpkin slices, then giving the yams about twenty minutes, then doing the goose, and then popping in the yams and vegetables simultaneously while the goose was being dismembered.
In theory, this strategy was not unsound. Yams and roasted vegetables are pretty forgiving of being popped in and out of ovens repeatedly. On the other hand, yams do take time to heat up, and roasted vegetables do take awhile to roast. They did turn out all right in the end, and the cranberries also turned out just fine.
The goose and the pie, however, proved a bit problematic. We don’t know why, as they both had tender attention from the cooks. Unfortunately the goose, while flavorful, proved to have a texture somewhat akin to heavy-duty rubber. There also did not seem to be much meat on it, which was mystifying. It was very difficult to find the meat and remove it from the bones. Vegetka will be feasting for days to come.
The pie crust was supposed to be browned in advance of being filled, so it too went into the oven after the goose came out. For reasons unknown to us (and even to my mother, an expert who was queried after the fact), the pie crust refused to brown, but sank into an oily mass in the bottom of the pan. (The only cause I can think of is that Michael put a curse on it by announcing early on that it would turn into a nuclear reactor and glow green.) Jesse was disconsolate that his pie crust should behave so, and expressed an intention to throw it out. Štěpanka and I were less pessimistic, and thought it could be salvaged, so I massaged it back into a pie-crust-like shape, we poured in the filling, and sent it back into the oven.
The sides of the pie crust eventually browned, and on the whole the filling cooked up tolerably, but the bottom of the pie was not quite what it should have been. The females in the group ate it all contentedly, but the males were pickier and ate only the tops of their pieces.
No matter, there was plenty of food, most of it was enjoyed, and wine, eggnog, and cookies were also consumed.
Other Christmas entertainments included roaming around the village and its environs (Michael was very skillful at leading us through shrubbery and up and down steep snowy gorges that required special climbing techniques), snowball fights, soccer played with chunks of ice (feet only, no other body parts), and a special showing of The Big Sleep, one of my presents to Michael (both it and The Invisible Man went over very well, to my relief).
And so a good time was had by all, even if not in quite the sentimental manner suggested by most holiday propaganda.

Michael and Jesse in front of the village information center. It is new and actually very nicely done, although we were startled to hear it say that the former German inhabitants had "moved on" after the war, a euphemism that suggested they were some sort of nomads rather than that they had been forcibly ejected.

The town hall.

A view up the street to the local shrine.

The inside of the shrine, courtesy of a broken window.

An abandoned church up the hill (not as large as the Dienzenhofer church, which I failed to get a good photo of). The abandoned church also appears to be baroque.

A view down the hill taken between snowballs.

Christmas Eve with carp.

Note: for more details about the holiday excitements (I forgot to mention the arsonist story and other matters), and for a link to an amusing insight into Czech gnomes, see Jesse's account of the weekend.

Filed under:
Czech holidays winter travel walks food

Merry Christmas, a bit late

There was, I am afraid, a slight unannounced hiatus in this blog. Yes, just think of it, I was not tied to the computer over the holidays! In fact, not only that, but I had no internet access. In short, I left the urban regions entirely to spend Christmas with Štěpanka and Michael, who live in a village in the former Sudetenland, roughly between Plzeň and Karlový Vary. Jesse was also invited, as Štěpanka enjoys having guests and they had become acquainted by telephone over a matter of baking soda.
I now realize I should have mentioned this fact before I left Prague, as when I finally got around to getting online again this evening, I discovered that several of my most faithful readers have been checking the blog regularly to see if I had posted anything new. (And I had not. Alas.)
Yes, most of my visitors over the weekend were not random web surfers, but a mixture of those I know well and those who have run across this blog and enjoyed it enough to return. I feel touched.
Merry Christmas, and (not to remain in the past) Happy Hanukah!
For your delectation, I post the two holiday cards currently available from Archelaus (unfortunately, neither really addresses Hanukah, so my apologies on that).

Filed under:
Prague Czech holidays