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.

As the Semester Ends...

I've said it before, and my opinion hasn't changed: I've had very good students this semester. They write pretty well, most of them have some idea how to analyze what they're looking at, and all in all they've been a pleasure.
This does not, of course, alleviate the mingled pain and amusement that comes from the strange things I encounter on final exams. Even some of my best students have gotten certain things alarmingly wrong.
I am getting used to the fact that a certain number of people each semester come to the conclusion that René Magritte was a woman and that therefore I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest must be a feminist work.
I was not really expecting, however, to get an intelligent but wrong analysis of Sylvia Sleigh's Turkish Bath as being set in a gay bathhouse.
It is not okay to call collages, sculptures, and photographs "painting."
Frida Kahlo was not a Social Realist, and Alfred Stieglitz was not a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Surely I can cover more than one movement per week without this sort of confusion?
I am a bit disturbed at the number of people who have classified Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Worker (they are holding hammer and sickle) as Nazi art. It appears that even many students who correctly identified it as a Soviet-made sculpture are not familiar with the symbolism of the hammer and sickle, despite the fact that I am sure I talked about this in class. Seeing the sickle referred to as a "chisel" was also rather surprising. I don't think today's youth are using enough hand tools. Even the hammer wasn't always correctly identified as such.
In somewhat the same vein, everyone does a pretty good job discussing Grant Wood's American Gothic, but please, can we call a pitchfork a pitchfork? If I keep reading about how the man holds his tool tightly or grips his tool firmly, I may be unable to continue grading.
I realize that by mentioning these things, I run the risk of making my students look bad, but in a class of about 40, the miracle is that there isn't really all that much to complain of. Overall, I think nearly all of them have learned a lot and I am sorry to say goodbye to them.

The Return from Manchester and the AAH

The AAH conference was satisfactorily interesting, although as my session took up both days, I didn't feel as though I could roam around investigating papers on all sorts of topics as I normally do at conferences. The only time I ventured out of my own session was to hear a paper on Toyen's collaboration with Radovan Ivšić, which was quite interesting in its discussion of the relationship of image to text. Otherwise, I was ensconced in the surrealist and surrealist-legacy camp, where we had a fair amount of Toyen already. (But there can never be too much Toyen, or at least not unless she becomes a figure of adulation like Frida Kahlo, and it may be that Kahlo's astounding celebrity is passing, given how few of my students have heard of her.)
Manchester looks like a place worth visiting, especially given that I didn't really have time to look around the museums where the various receptions were held. The town hall, where we were welcomed by the Lord Mayor (who has bright green hair and exhorted us repeatedly to sample the local nightlife), is an impressive gothic-revival building with a fine set of murals by Ford Madox Brown. I was hoping to see his Work, given that I had just shown it in class, but that was elsewhere and I was too tired to hunt it down.
The Intro to Modern papers have been duly turned in (most of them) and I have begun grading them. Thus far they're excellent and I feel vastly pleased. No one has gotten less than an A. Of course, that will not hold true for the entire class, but it would be nice if only it could.

Papers and More Papers

As I prepare to leave town for the AAH conference in Manchester (that's the original British Manchester, not one of those upstart Manchesters that seem to exist in every eastern state here), my Intro to Modern students are in the throes of preparing their class papers.
They have the option of doing either an article comparison, which is intended to hone their analytical skills, or a research paper on a topic to be approved by me. The first time I taught this class, there were quite a few research papers, some of them remarkably good. Last semester there were not very many and some of those were evidently by students who needed further guidance on just what a research paper is, but there were also some outstanding papers. This semester the research papers will again be rather few, but I think they will be good. I will be getting one on Czech cubism, one on Croatian naive painting, one on the relationship of gay sexuality to the work of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, one on Picasso's Blue Period (this is an alluring topic for students, I have noticed), one on Magritte and philosophy, one on Magritte and Dali (I wait to see exactly where this goes), one on Abstract Expressionism, and one on Malevich and Suprematism.
A few papers will be coming in tomorrow to give me something to read on the plane, but most of them, I am sure, will be appearing in my box next Tuesday.
My Realism and Impressionism students have already done all their papers, while the Czech Modernism seminar has just turned in their rough drafts, which I have not had any time to examine. I suppose I might read those on the plane too.

Baudelaire and Clark

I may complain a bit from time to time about infelicitous things in my students' exams and the like, but really I do have a very satisfactory group (well, three groups since I teach three classes) this semester.
While the number of things I need to get done (prep, grading, journal articles, etc.) tends to prompt feelings of alarm and angst, actually sitting down to grade the second batch of Realism and Impressionism papers has been quite pleasant. Nearly the entire class writes pretty well, and nearly all of them think through the material with admirable ability. In fact, nobody is having any serious problems, although I daresay some of them would like to get a somewhat better grade than they are earning. Thus, while I was a bit perturbed to find that the first two papers I read (examining Baudelaire's "The Painting of Modern Life" in conjunction with two chapters by T. J. Clark) failed to mention Baudelaire at all, those papers were generally all right in other respects. And the best papers in the class are really enjoyable, combining well-chosen quotations from Baudelaire and Clark with pertinent images and supple analysis of art and texts.
This makes me feel, temporarily, content.

The Joy of Exams

While generally speaking, I think it's incumbent upon me to encourage my students, and while on the whole they are doing pretty well, there are always times when they invite their own doom and even (dare I say it?) some ridicule.
I always do a section of term definitions on my Intro to Modern midterm. Define twelve terms that relate to modern art, for one point each--given that these are all terms covered in class and that the book has a glossary defining most of them, how hard can this really be? Yet somehow this is a thing even my best students tend to have some trouble with. I think only one person thus far this semester has gotten full points.
I thought, for instance, that this semester I had really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Japonisme, because the majority of students define Orientalism incorrectly. But apparently I really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Primitivism (also a problem area), so while no one this semester is confusing that pair, most of the definitions for Orientalism are really definitions of Japonisme. This would not be so odd if it weren't that Orientalism is such a major theme in the academic world these days and I would have thought my students (unlike me) might have imbibed the works of Edward Said with their mothers' milk. I guess Orientalism is more the province of graduate students than of undergrads. I will, thus, keep trying to make clear that Orientalism generally involves eroticization of "exotic" foreign cultures, particularly Muslim cultures but also potentially Hindu and Far Eastern cultures. At least, that's Orientalism in 19th and early 20th century art. And it's not as though we haven't looked at a good many examples.
The very term Avantgarde is, for some reason, also problematic. A certain number of people always do get this right without the slightest difficulty, but a strangely large number always suppose it's a specific movement, or that it's "a new country's art movement" or some other odd thing.
And again, despite my continued efforts to clarify the meaning of Nonobjective art, students continue to define it as "art without a focus" and art that can mean different things to different people. I think some of them probably understand the term better than they are able to define it, but very few seem to state that it's art that doesn't depict something you can see out there in the real world. They don't seem to connect it with Malevich's Black Square (which they reserve for their definitions of Suprematism) or with Kandinsky's later work. Maybe I should make them define Nonobjective later in the semester, when they've seen more examples.
Of course, there are always some definitions that are simply humorous.
"Supermatism--It was an art movement that would just use simple geographic shapes to depict their work." I actually gave partial credit for this because despite the wording, it's clear the writer has some idea what Suprematism is. Anyone (myself included) might accidentally write "geographic" instead of "geometric." All the same, I'm envisioning Malevich attempting to depict the Black Square by means of a map of Moscow or Novosibirsk.
I guess Malevich will keep us amused. And so will all that fuzzy-looking subjective Nonobjective art. At least everyone seems clear on what Pointillism is, and nearly everyone can say something reasonable about Fauvism, despite the paucity of references to the term meaning "wild beast-ism".

Spring Arrives, Sort Of

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

On the Positive Side...

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

Diligence Isn't Enough

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

Sylvia Sleigh, Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, 1977

You Can Rely on Malevich's Black Square...

... to prompt controversy in every Intro to Modern class. Students generally find Cubist, Fauvist, Expressionist, and Futurist works palatable, but the minute Black Square goes up, a sense of outrage inevitably erupts. How can a plain black square be art, several people always demand to know. What kind of perversity is this and what kind of drugs was Malevich taking that he gave up doing odd but somewhat intelligible paintings of peasants and knife grinders in favor of the Black Square?
That's not to say that there aren't always other students who think the Black Square is a perfectly reasonable thing to paint, or who at least express a curiosity about what Malevich was trying to get across. But the Black Square is invariably the work that prompts a period of confusion and dismay that generally continues with Duchamp's Fountain and does not dissipate when we move into Dada. Things usually calm down by the time we get to Jackson Pollock, whether because everyone is acclimated or because we've had a break in the form of Regionalism, Social and Socialist Realism, and Nazi art. Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom, however, is usually good for stirring up the crowd again.

Immersed?

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

Busy or Just Wasting Time?

Regular readers might be wondering whether I've become lazy, overwhelmed, or have been taken into computerless custody by irritated rabbits. I am not entirely sure which except that the rabbits have not actually gotten me away from the computer. In fact, at the moment they are comfortably reclining under a chair, having extracted extra petting because I spent the entire day at home.
But it's true I've been spending quite a bit of time doing this-that-and-the-other thing related to teaching, and one of those things has been the lengthy process of making what must be well over 2000 reproductions of Czech art readily available to my students and other interested persons. One of these pictures is in fact now illustrating a post over at A Journey Round My Skull, in case anyone wants to see an early (cubist) Otto Gutfreund sketch.
It has also been my intention, for the past several days, to post the list several of my colleagues have compiled relating to the things tables are used for, but I keep not having the list on me at the moments when I think about blogging. My apologies to Robert and Aaron for my sluggish ways, as no doubt they have been anxiously waiting for this to go online. Art historians have to occupy their minds with strange conceptual matters from time to time in order to prevent becoming too preoccupied with actual art objects.
And there you have it.

Now It's Online

There's nothing like saying something hasn't happened to ensure that it will. Or so it sometimes seems. I was expecting it to take three or four months for my dissertation to go online at school, but it went up today. So, for those who really want to read about Toyen, Czech surrealism, and related topics, it's available for download. And now I really need to get back to work on writing the book proposal. Or at least thinking about how to grade the papers my seminar students just turned in discussing what Miloš Jiránek (1900) and Bohumil Kubišta (1911) had to say about Czech nationalism in art. Because the next set of papers to grade are on Romantic landscape in relation to the ideas of Burke, Hazlitt, and various German critics.
Meanwhile, the car refuses to start and the phone refuses to acknowledge that there really is a dial-tone coming in. That's just great. Fortunately I've been able to borrow an alarmingly high-tech phone so that if anyone tries to reach me to schedule a job interview, I might actually get the message. (It's all mystifying because no rabbits have chewed any cords and the internet still functions. So it must be the phone itself.)

Another Done Dissertation is a Good Dissertation

I'm not the only person with a newly done dissertation. My friend Christine finished hers and defended beautifully to a whole roomful of people the first week of class (I'm not sure whether that full roomful was due to the time of the semester, to her being in Communication instead of Art History, or just to her personal magnetism... we'll say the last was a key factor). Christine even has a book contract already. But neither Christine's dissertation nor mine are online yet as the university moves slowly on that and Proquest moves even more slowly.
Danah Boyd, whose blog posts I sometimes note, has also just finished and as her dissertation is on social networking, it is hardly surprising that it is already online. Check it out and learn all you ever wanted to know about teenagers and social networking sites. I think the next topic to be dealt with is how the rest of us use these sites, a thing that has been intriguing me of late (when avoiding actual work and importunate rabbits).

Questionable Bits

On the whole, the American Art papers are very agreeable to read: pretty literate and usually showing a good degree of understanding of their topics. But they would not be student papers if there were not occasional lapses in phrasing and thought, would they? For example:
"Lovell tried to show how the American family photo evolved over time across the 18th century." (Photos in the 18th century?!)
And, on an exam, one student identifies Harlem Renaissance painter Palmer Hayden as Arnold Palmer. Well, I suppose Palmer Hayden may have played golf and Arnold Palmer may have painted, but they're not the same person. Another student, while correctly stating that Edmonia Lewis was the first woman of African and Native American descent to make her career in art, got a little carried away and said she was the first woman to go to college, which she was not (although she was one of Oberlin's earlier nonwhite female students). Another rather charming error: Emmanuel Leutze's Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way was identified as Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Toll. I have to admit I much prefer the latter title.
I was delighted to see evidence of considerable study on the Intro to Modern exams. Of course, there were still some errors of fact and interpretation, and most of the students could have written more, but they really made a pretty universal effort to learn the material in the second half of the course. Major progress for some of them, especially those with no prior background in art history (which was really most of the class).
Really, despite the occasional weird bits, I am quite happy with both groups.

Defense Done

One cannot complete a PhD without the help of one's departmental secretary. (Or, very likely, go in to the defense without some coffee, at least when somehow there hasn't been time for either breakfast or lunch.)

I was asked to start off with a little introductory piece about how the project developed and what possessed me to undertake it or alter it or spend such an abnormal amount of time reading old Czech magazines.

My committee seemed to want me to expound on quite a few things, and looked very grave when not in fits of laughter. Their first question was why I hadn't put the title on the manuscript. As usual, I couldn't remember what on earth I had called it. This prompted various suggestions which were regarded as extremely witty and which went by far too quickly for me to write down.

After the committee admitted that they thought it was a pretty good dissertation, and after they had incited me to blather on for an hour or so about who knows what, we decided it was time for the champagne.

Some people weren't sure whether I was capable of opening a champagne bottle without help. It's true I hadn't opened one in awhile and had forgotten that a corkscrew is not needed.

I managed to spill only a small amount of champagne, none of it on the dissertation itself.

Finally we had the glasses filled and proceeded to clink our fancy departmental plasticware.

Finally, my advisor examined an Archelaus card and wanted to know why I had failed to thank her for "the embroidered codpiece."

Photos by Kristen.

Almost Done?

Since tomorrow I get to defend my dissertation, today we'll take a break from the intriguing and sometimes startling world of portraiture.
People keep telling me "You're almost done," but since I have no shortage of papers to grade, 70 exams about to follow, job applications to send out, three classes to prepare for next semester, and miscellaneous other things to deal with, my usual reaction to that is "Huh? What's almost done?" It only gradually dawns on me that they must be referring to the PhD process.
I met with my advisor on Friday to see if she had any particular suggestions for the big event. To a large extent her mind was on her new subzero-rated down coat (good) and on recent university budget cuts (bad), but we had a pleasant chat about the defense and my future in general. She did not anticipate anyone saying anything too annoying, or perhaps even anything at all annoying, at the defense, and she suggested I get busy writing my book proposal and picking out my top choices among the various university presses. Well--she did not say I had to do that before 2009, merely "in the next couple of months." I interpret that as meaning "before College Art Association." I guess there is some chance that would be possible. At this point in my life a book proposal is no longer the terrifying project it once was; it's just something you sit down and do when you have time. (Time? what's that?)
So... tomorrow at 12:30 we'll all gather and talk about this large thing I've produced. One of my committee members called me last night, in the midst of reading, to suggest I hasten to read a new article on Karel Teige in the Slavic Review. I'm not so sure what the rush is. I looked up the article. I've gone out for drinks with its author and think his dissertation was excellent. Do I really need to read the article right away? Why not next week or next month? But at least my committee member admitted to enjoying my dissertation and mentioned a press I should consider approaching. I hear that another committee member also finds the dissertation enjoyable, so we'll assume that the remaining member feels the same way.
I'm glad that I'm at a university that still does dissertation defenses, that I'm in a department that doesn't schedule them until the dissertation is passable, and that all in all it's something to look forward to instead of to dread. (Of course, some people hope it could be arranged to involve armed combat, see comments here. There's no accounting for individual perversity.)
I think I will now return to grading the American Art papers, which thus far have been gratifyingly good.

Nice Little Surprises

One of my students stayed after class to ask a question about her paper, and we got into a longer conversation, as often happens. When she mentioned that she planned to become a vet and start a small-animal practice, I said she should consider specializing in animals like rabbits and guinea pigs.
It turned out that not only does she have a rabbit of her own and not only is she a rabbit volunteer with the local shelters, but she's currently fostering the enchanting Sophia in the hopes that her rabbit will fall in love with the visitor. Sophia is even moving toward being litterbox-trained (she is one of the only rabbits I've ever met who did not believe in litterboxes).
I've certainly met people who turned out to know one or more of my friends, but the other day when I was watching a program about network theory and "six degrees of separation," it did not occur to me that I'd be discovering that one of my students and I know some of the same shelter rabbits.

Never Feel Momentarily OK

On the whole, I enjoy this whole academic adventure. When in the mood, I don't mind working at it seven days a week.
But I really dislike feeling as though seven days a week is necessary not to fall behind. This makes me irritable. So today I thought perhaps I could take the day off.
Apparently not. When I returned from the library with some fiction in hand, I discovered Orion having a sneezing fit. RELAPSE! I rapidly corralled both rabbits into the X-pen and medicated the sniffly one, to his fury. Ms. Spots showed no particular annoyance at being confined, until she tried to be friendly to The Angry One, who began to take out his aggressions on her instead of on the wire. He began chasing her around in a malignant frenzy and trying to bite her, so I had to take her out. She was quite upset at her devoted admirer turning on her like that. Usually they only have spats about treats, and not in a limited space.
I then turned to checking my email and found the advice that I should (to all intents and purposes) plaster the civilized world with my job applications. This is depressing. I was hoping ten or twenty would be enough.
As if that weren't enough, the only suitable looking film I could rustle up to have shown on Thursday has to be brought from storage (it is a reel film), might not arrive in time, and will have to be shown by someone or other specially brought in for the purpose. Not really what I had in mind.
I don't feel any happier than Orion, but at least I'm not biting anything or anyone. Yet.

Defense Scheduled and All That

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