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.

Back and Away Again

The Spotted Pair and I had an uneventful trip to Jesse's, although I enjoyed it more than they did as they dislike car travel and were not too pleased about the heat in Jesse's apartment either. But a pleasant time was had by the human contingent.
The Spotted Pair will be staying home for my next trip, which involves going to Minneapolis for the gigantic Berkshire Women's History Conference, which should be rather exciting. I'll be giving a paper there on the New Woman in interwar Czechoslovakia, which is the last of my rather long string of conference papers. No doubt other tempting conferences will come along, but it seems time to turn some of those papers into articles... well, when not writing other things, like final bits of dissertation and chunks of fiction. Perhaps Ms. Spots could be trained to somehow turn conference papers into articles for me, picking through my notes to add on additional material and get rid of as many images as possible. She is, after all, an intelligent creature. On the other hand, I suspect her interest in my research is almost nil. She believes my time is best spent petting her and purveying yogurt and other treats on demand.

First Republic Women

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

Citations That Annoy

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

Chapter 5 and the Dessicated Brussel Sprout Fad

Chapter 5 submitted fairly meekly to its fate today and allowed me to turn it into something like a finished chapter, what with introduction and some summing up. This is not to say it couldn't be improved (probably significantly), but it can be shown to other humans now.
I anticipate that Chapter 6 will follow suit tomorrow, although it ought to have more bits written about Toyen's book illustrations. The schedule might also get thrown off kilter somewhat by the need to visit that tedious but sometimes tempting realm of commerce, The Waterfront, in order to pick up a picture-framing job and buy pellets and hay for the other members of the household. Purchase of some lettuce and other greens might be in order as well.
I really don't know why these lapines can't get by on any old thing that might be in the cupboard or refrigerator, as this seems to keep me alive, but then again it is always best to treat others better than oneself. Besides, I have finally discovered something Orion will accept as a snack when Ms. Spots is having her yogurt: dessicated brussel sprouts. I really can't say what he likes about these, but he thinks they are really great. Having accidentally dried out about ten that I had planned to eat myself, now I suppose I'll have to start intentionally drying more (by placing them in a mesh bag and leaving them in the refrigerator for weeks). It is better than having slimy, moldy ones, in any case.
Ms. Spots, who likes nearly all vegetarian foods, turns up her nose at dessicated brussel sprouts.
For the proofreaders out there, it is correct to write Brussels sprout, brussels sprout, or brussel sprout. Brussels sprout appears to be the most common form, since of course the name refers to the city of Brussels, but at the moment the excess of Ss just irritates me. I also seem to recall reading that rabbits shouldn't be given cruciferous vegetables, but one dried sprout every day or two doesn't seem to be causing Orion any problems.

Moving Right Along...

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

Still Life with Dissertation

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

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

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

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

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

And there you have it.

Continuing to Slice

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't plan to cut any of these.

Increase Thy Vocabulary

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

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


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

Christmas in the East Bay

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

Gardening and the Art of Dissertation Writing

My holiday dissertation goal is to cut the thing to approximately the maximum length my advisor deems desirable. Last I checked there were still about 240 pages to go. While that's a lot, I'm confident that there are lots more notes and disconnected quotes that can be trimmed away, and for that matter whole sections that can be used as conference papers and such.
Still, this week, Rob Brezsny hints that cutting and polishing the dissertation too far might be counterproductive:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Some weeds are good for flowers and vegetables, protecting them from predatory insects. So say horticulturalists Stan Finch and Rosemary Collier, writing in *Biologist* magazine. When the bugs come looking for their special treats -- the plants we love -- they often get waylaid by the weeds, landing on them first and getting fooled into thinking there's nothing more valuable nearby. So for example, when cabbages are planted in the midst of clover, flies lay eggs on only seven percent of them, compared to a 36-percent infestation rate on cabbages that are grown in bare soil with no clover nearby. I recommend that you use this as a key metaphor in 2008, Leo. Make sure there are always a few chickweed or henbit weeds surrounding your ripening tomatoes.

I think I will not be polishing the dissertation to such a slender and glossy form that it will lack interesting and amusing footnotes or the occasional mild tangent. After all, I have to leave something for my committee to chew on!

Theory or Narrative?

In the midst of my preparations to fly off to AAASS (the gigantic Slavic conference), I stopped to check my email. One email informed me that the discussant for my panel won't be able to attend, which was decidedly not welcome news.
A rather more agreeable item was Rob Breszny's take on my horoscope for the week:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Stories interest me more than beliefs. I'd rather
hear you regale me with tales of your travels than listen to you recite your dogmas. Filmmaker Ken Burns agrees with me. He's worried about the increasing number of people who love theories more than stories. "We are experiencing the death of narrative," he told the *San Francisco Chronicle.* "We are all so opinionated that we don't actually submit to narrative anymore. That's the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then becomes the conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art." Your assignment, Leo, is to help reverse this soul-damaging trend. Spout fewer opinions and tell more stories. Encourage others to do the same.

I like this. While I have plenty of opinions, I don't think they're as interesting as a good story (though a good story can be wrapped around an opinion). And I certainly don't think theories are, as a rule, as interesting as stories. Some theories, yes. Not all. And who wants to hear "I'm going to tell you a bedtime theory..."?
The scholarly world often prefers theory to narrative, when actually it needs both. Narrative with no analysis is usually just raw material, but theory with no narrative quickly becomes indigestible. I suspect that's true even in the sciences.
As a primarily story-telling animal, I always imagine that it will be hard to inject the required amount of analysis into the work, but usually I find that if I tell enough story and get in enough description, the analysis follows in a surprisingly natural fashion.
Of course, it might be that this horoscope is really a call for me to write more fiction. That might be a bit difficult to do during a week in which I'm mostly exploring a major academic conference and maybe glancing over a dissertation chapter or two on the plane, but you never know.
At the moment, I'm mainly hoping not to get real laryngitis. I can talk, but my throat has that ominous laryngitis-feeling. That would be bad for both my panel and for storytelling with my various Slavic-specialist friends.

The Academic Life, Yet Again

Every now and then my ability to pay attention to anything I ought to be doing completely deserts me. It began to do this over the weekend (although I did get some work done at my neighborhood cafe) and I was utterly hopeless by Monday. The worst moment came when I attempted to look through Lacan's Ecrits before returning the book (which had been recalled for another patron. A year or so ago, I had been well enough able to understand what he was getting at in one essay that I thought I should re-examine it. Re-examination suggested that in the meantime I had lost too many brain cells to even dream about Lacan. I was tempted to throw the book across the room, but nicely returned it to the library figuring that if I later can't live without it, I can always recall it myself.
The nice thing about these fits, like most of Ms. Spots' ailments, is that they pass quickly. Just as the Spotted Wonder was ready to be extra cuddly by Saturday evening, her human was refreshed and pretty much ready to work again by Tuesday morning. This was a good thing, as today I have to overnight the latest postdoc application, all SIX COPIES of it. I think I have gotten the bugs out of the writing sample, which is a different one than I used for the last few, although I wouldn't say that any single writing sample gives an accurate picture of my (diverse) methodological concerns. We will just hope that the writing sample is suitable; my advisor thought that in this case it might be best to pick one that bears some relation to the research I am proposing doing, and my other potential samples were less closely related.
I was also able to make progress on my impending conference paper. Sometimes one writes these from scratch and other times one pulls together paragraphs from various old stuff and then by some sort of mysterious process comes up with something new (rather like Frankenstein) from these scraps. This one is the Frankenstein variety, but I think that by the time it is done, it should not too closely resemble any of its original parts, which come from something like three separate dissertation chapters and one or two other papers. After all, in tying these things together, one does change the wording considerably and of course they all have to be made to pull together to support whatever the paper's theme might be. It is a curious process, but after writing so many funding applications and a fair number of conference papers, I am finding that my ability to rework material for new purposes is definitely increasing. Whenever I start, I feel certain that the result will only be some sort of warmed-over mess, but it always seems to end up as something I am rather pleased with. With the conference papers, I always do end up saying something that I haven't quite articulated before, which does advance my thinking.
Meanwhile, one of my colleagues is defending her dissertation today. This exciting event occurs in the afternoon, and I am certain she will do an impressive job of it. We have another defense in my department next week, but I'm afraid I will have to present those congratulations before and after the fact since I'll be out of town.

Weininger and/or His Publisher

After having put it off for some time (along with many other things, some of them not academic), I took it upon myself to check out Otto Weininger's infamous Sex and Character (1903), which was strangely influential for a good many years.
I have not really launched properly into reading it, but the publisher of the Sixth German Edition seemed to think that Weininger's characterization of women into the "two elemental figures" of the Courtesan and Mother was something new and striking.
While I realize that every idea was new at some point, I really don't think that this particular dichotomy was new in 1903, and I will be surprised if Weininger himself thought it was. However, the publisher strikes me as much less intelligent than Weininger. The publisher refers to "the programme of the modern feminist movement, with its superficialities and its lies" whereas while Weininger is famous for his misogyny, he did regard all men and women as being comprised of varying percentages of what I suppose we could call male and female essence and claimed that his analysis "turns against man in the end" and "assigns to man the heaviest and most real blame."
Well, we shall see, or that is we shall see if I can slog my way through to the end.
It's not really what I might consider a reward for having drafted yet another postdoc proposal this morning. It seemed, however, time to move away from Reich and the German sex reform movement, and when one contemplates early 20th-century theories of gender, one can hardly leave out Weininger.

We Pause for Reorganization

I realize that it is perverse of me to enjoy my dissertation as much as I generally do, but I cannot help it. Writing my dissertation is much, much, more fun than most of the activities that others tell me distract them dreadfully from dissertation-writing--things like vacuuming, washing dishes, and so forth. (Petting domestic mammals, however, is an important distraction and Ms. Spots and Orion make sure that I am properly distracted.)
This morning I was quite happily settled at my local cafe with Atina Grossmann's Reforming Sex, a book which I had started to read before going to Prague but not really felt certain quite pertained to my research, since it deals with Germany. At this point, however, I can see that it is chock-full of useful stuff and must be read slowly since it adds considerable useful information to various sections. After all, before I went to Prague, I had never heard of (such trivia as) the early contraceptive Patentex, promoted by the Hydiko store and the related magazine Moderní hygiena, which now I gather was also involved in a small scandal at Magnus Hirschfeld's research institute in Berlin. Nor had I realized what a prolific author Max Hodann was, as I had only come across references to his Czech-language books, not his many German-language articles.
By the time I left the cafe, I felt ready to spend the rest of the day learning more about this sort of thing.
When I returned home, however, I discovered that I could actually see my living room well. This is a rather rare occurrence, as while I have a large living-room window, the only time there is any light to speak of in the room is during the afternoon on sunny days--not a time I am very likely to be at home. The rest of the time, the room is a very dim place indeed.
This astonishing phenomenon prompted me to forget all about Reforming Sex and propelled me into a positively abnormal state of activity. Not only did I vacuum the carpet, but I put numerous summer clothes into a suitcase, emptied another box of art books (not that any of the art books in the living room are in any intelligible order), hung up a mirror, and would have hung up several other things except that they will require assistance. I did considerable rearranging of two closets, which is not to say they are all that usable even now, but they are somewhat improved from their previous state. (I am still baffled at the near-unusability of my three closets, but since I will not be living here long, there is no point in spending money to improve them.)
Ms. Spots and Orion, though they were very much opposed to the sound of the vacuum cleaner, were pleased that I had moved one of the chairs yet again and felt that all the small changes in scenery were for the better, as rabbits like rearrangements in furniture and objects.
They were very disappointed when I gave up all this activity and settled down to scan some drawings and paintings inspired by Štyrský's dreams.

Reich Returns to the Scene

It's on to the next set of dissertation chapters, never mind that the ones I've turned in are decidedly imperfect and incomplete.
By happy chance, when I dropped by the university bookstore this morning in search of blue file folders (they did not have the shade of blue I use for my academic filing), I discovered a heavily discounted book on Wilhelm Reich.
Reich is, I might point out, one of the theorists discussed in Chapter 5, and until today his subsection was small and undeveloped. I knew enough about him to have the feeling he could be important, but I really had no desire to try to read his work in Czech translation, so I had been putting him off.
For those of you who might be wondering, this is that same Wilhelm Reich who wrote The Function of the Orgasm and died in an American prison after escaping the Nazis.
The more I read of/about Reich, just as the more I read of/about Fourier, the more I favor him. I am sure he was wrong or extreme about some of his ideas, but on the whole I like him. I am a bit skeptical of the historical validity of his idea (taken from Engels) that human society was once a peaceful, satisfied matriarchy that transmogrified into an evil, capitalist, repressed patriarchy, but this is partly because I'm unconvinced that women are innately better than men and partly because I really don't know what would have turned a contented society into one that sold its women and developed capitalism. I mean, one such society, perhaps, but globally?
Nonetheless, I think Reich's early work is impressive and very much attuned to surrealist ideas, at least as surrealism developed from the 1930s on. I will be picking through Bohuslav Brouk to see how often he mentioned Reich... And then there's Reich's opposition to the Rankian desire to return to the womb. Does this mean Štyrský would have rejected Reich in favor of Rank, or that he would have concluded Rank set out the problem and that Reich offered a solution? Inquiring minds want to know.

Roaming the Mission Arts Scene, for Starters

I had sort of hoped that Saturday might be devoted to learning to kayak, but no one I suggested the idea to seemed to be available and it did cost money. So I went to the library instead.
Cesar did have a plan for the evening, however. We managed to get John to join us for burritos before he went off to see a movie with other friends (who are evidently more of a dissertation-distraction than we are), and then began roaming the open studios and such of San Francisco's Mission. It seems that the Mission is becoming less and less a working-class Hispanic neighborhood and more and more a place where the barbershops and dry-cleaners of yore are turning into small galleries. One can only have mixed feelings about that, as while small galleries are a fine thing, I'm not sure there needs to be more than one per city block. Once in awhile a person needs a barbership or dry-cleaners too.
But we enjoyed ourselves and saw some pretty good art, listened to some excellent Indian music, and joined the salsa dance party on the Casa Sanchez back patio. We also got to see some dancers on stilts who lit up the performance with fancy torch-handling.
Cesar says this neighborhood-wide arts extravaganza occurs every couple of months or so. He took some pictures, but I don't yet have copies.
On Sunday, my writing group met down in Los Altos, where the weather is warmer. Before I departed, I heard my father remark that if we were lucky, the sun might come out by 4 o'clock (my mother tells me that this did not come to pass). Usually things warm up as soon as I get south of San Francisco, but it was drizzly and cold almost all the way. Even Los Altos was cooler than usual, so my sleeveless dress was a bit unwarranted as I kept my sweatshirt on most of the day.
The company was agreeable, however. Betty put one of her Voyager Tarot cards under each person's lunch plate and, somewhat miraculously, each person managed to sit with a strangely appropriate card. Mine was one called Breakthrough, which Betty said was related to the Chariot in the major arcana. She said this one refers to having the momentum to leap forward and surmount obstacles or reach new understandings. It sounded like a good card to get when a person is finishing up a dissertation and preparing to go on the job market.
While our group is supposed to be a fiction group, we've listened to a good many nonfiction projects over the years. This time everything was nonfiction, as Janet presented a new version of something she's been trying to work out in the gray area between fact and fiction (we argued for her to just go ahead and call it a novel and get rid of references to the "real" story) and I tested out a section of a dissertation chapter. The section in question deals with the Parisian cultural scene of the 1920s, a topic that has been covered in great detail by expatriate American memoirists, biographers, and scholars like Shari Benstock. The Czech experience in Paris, however, is not quite so intensively studied, so without attempting a history of the Czechoslovak expatriate community, I tried to show how Paris was presented in Czech periodicals and correspondence, and how this related to Toyen. Whether there is enough Toyen in the section is hard to say, but my audience seemed enthralled by the quotations about Montmartre and Montparnasse, so I suppose my committee cannot accuse it of being dull.

Begone, O Journal Article

The journal article to which I devoted a significant portion of my weekend has now been sent off. Both Cesar and Megan, in separate phone calls, inquired whether it was finally done and out of my hands, to which I replied that it was. This was shortly before it dawned on me that I had neglected to attach the electronic file(s).
I was really not sure why, in 2007, any academic journal needed to be mailed four paper copies plus a diskette or CD. John, who has been doing a good deal of peer-reviewing over the past few years, was incredulous that any journal would want to deal with envelopes full of paper copies and disks when one could simply email the file to the editor. Certainly I was very unhappy at the last minute when I was simultaneously feeding more paper into my parents' printer, writing up the abstract that I had forgotten to do earlier, wondering whether we had any binder clips in the house, digging through the envelope drawer and finding no unused specimens, and creating Word and PDF versions of my document. I kept losing track of where I had laid the four binder-clipped copies. At the same time, I was looking up the address of my future apartment building and hunting for my checkbook to write replacement checks for the application fee and first-month rent that had apparently disappeared in the mail, as these too were going to have to be overnighted.
So perhaps it's not too surprising that I forgot to turn off the laptop and swap in the CD unit (usually I keep the second hard drive in its place) so that I could create a CD (since the laptop has no floppy drive).
The editors, fortunately, were on their toes with the mail and promptly emailed with a request that I send my file as an attachment, so it is all (one hopes) truly done with for the time being.
Of course, if they like the thing at all, they might want revisions, but we can assume that that would occur at least a month from now, when I will be distracted by a different set of problems.

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.

More OCR Adventures

Perhaps it is masochistic of me, but I have not yet grown thoroughly sick of digitizing and running OCR on difficult documents. This may be a character flaw, or it may be a form of dissertation avoidance.
The project of doing OCR on Robert Benayoun's Erotique du Surréalisme proved much more troublesome than anticipated. ABBYY does recognize French nicely, but evidently, due to lots of captions in small print, I should have used a higher resolution than 300. Benayoun also uses a great many words which are not in ABBYY's dictionary. I was going to start adding some of them, but discovered I had to answer too many questions about each word (is it a noun? is it masculine or feminine? etc.) to be sure that I was going to set most of the words up properly so that all of their forms could be recognized (my French is good, but perhaps not that good). The numerous illustrations also posed a problem because ABBYY was sure that it could see random bits of text within most of them. Having to delete out all that extraneous stuff was a time-waster, plus someone had made some markings here and there in the margins and done some underlining. I was vastly relieved to finish that project, and stop having to hand-rotate pages that hadn't been recognized properly, and stop telling it, yet again, to ignore all instances of the word androgyne.
In a fit of dementia, I thought that the 1927 anthology Fronta would be a suitable task. The fact that it is just slightly larger than the scanning area did not prove a problem, nor (thus far) has the binding been too tight. It does, however, make me curse the typographic habits of the 1920s avant-garde.
Not only is the text trilingual (ABBYY can handle that), but the layout is an OCR nightmare. No capitals are used, which causes two problems: first, since no sentence begins with a capital, ABBYY helpfully interprets nearly every period as a comma. Second, since German capitalizes its nouns, every German noun has to be dealt with as "ignore all." Typographers of the 1920s were also very fond of using extra spaces between letters to denote emphasis; I am not sure what they had against italics, but clearly they were staunch foes of italics. Well, I must admit that ABBYY is pretty good at recognizing words out of all this wide-spacing, but one cannot expect miracles from it. And if I don't have it recognize these as words, none of the words will be searchable. The OCR under the image has to make sense rather than slavishly copying the layout of the original. And then there are lots of big black bullets separating the different languages. These almost never OCR as bullets because they are so big. Whether rendered as a 9, a 0, or what, each one has to be deleted out. After 16 pages of this, I am annoyed with Zděnek Rossmann, even though on other days I think he was a brilliant designer.
I suppose, however, that I will gradually continue since (Fronta being relatively rare) my efforts will eventually benefit some population greater than just myself.