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.

Win Some, Lose Some?

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

And on to Philadelphia...

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

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.

Random Strangeness

As the rabbits and I prepare for our summer trip to the Bay Area (that is, the California one; I have learned that there's also one in Clear Lake, Texas, which even has some things in common with the California one), we or at least I have encountered various odd, if presumably insignificant, things.
Why, for example, should the glass part of my driver's side mirror choose to fall off? I heard a noise outside as I started the car, and even opened the door to look and see what it was, but didn't see anything. Naturally I later discovered that the mirror was gone and I had run over it.
Why is it that, when I took two blankets to the cleaners a couple of months ago, the tag said they would be ready in a few days and that the cleaners were not responsible for items left over 45 days, but when I came by three weeks later, the blankets were not yet done, and indeed when I came by now (at least 45 days later), they still weren't done and apparently the assumption is that when you bring in blankets for spring cleaning, you want them stored all summer because you won't be needing them? I don't in fact need the blankets yet, but I would prefer to know ahead of time that the cleaners could/would store them. What if I had been moving out of town?
What possessed my cell phone screen to go blank (requiring it to be shipped to T-Mobile for repair or replacement) and the loaner phone, just before I returned it to our local T-Mobile store (which I might add has given me excellent customer service) to suddenly claim I had no voicemail account? Actually, the latter wasn't the loaner phone's problem, but I don't know what caused the voicemail account to disappear for about 8 hours until tech support did some sort of magic and it reappeared complete with saved messages.
Why (not that this is anything new) does my apartment always feel about 20 degrees hotter than the temperature outdoors? I really don't like to listen to the airconditioner, even though I am glad to have it.
Why (not that this is anything new either) must Ms. Spots wait until just after I have swept the floor and emptied the litterbox to leave a pile of droppings in front of said litterbox? I think that, at the age of six, she is a bit too set in her ways to be trained out of this practice. She does use the litterbox, but seems to regard the area in front of it as an adjunct litterbox.
And why, when Megan visited over the weekend, did Orion feel that it was absolutely necessary to invade the bedroom at 6 a.m. and chew not only a phone cord and a USB extension cord (neither normally available to him), but to chew up the cord to Megan's phone charger, which had fallen on the floor during the night?
Pondering these peculiarities of life, I am also pondering whether the rabbits will be easily persuaded into the carrier to go to the airport. Orion is presently sitting in the litterbox doing his special Meditation and Contact with Alien Beings routine, and Ms. Spots is napping by the dining room table, so at the moment it would be easy to put them in the carrier, but we have an hour or so to go before we leave, and they may well decide it's time to move to their daytime napping spot under the couch. But there is no point in putting them in the carrier now, as it is disagreeable enough for them to spend 12-13 hours in the carrier without adding on an extra hour. --What, 12-13 hours just to fly across the US? Well, an hour and a half to get to the airport on the bus, an hour or hour and a half to deal with airport security and all that, and then of course we don't have a direct flight (whatever happened to those?) so we go out of our way to Atlanta and take an hour to change planes, and then it will take an hour or hour and a half to collect the suitcase and take BART at the other end. It always ends up with 12-13 hours of rabbits in carrier, and while they hate it, I must say they take it very well considering everything.

Toyen Paintings in Houston

On my Houston trip I saw an impressive amount of art, both belonging to the collector who invited me, and elsewhere. I got to see three Toyen paintings, belonging to two different collectors.
Message of the Forest (1934) is a large work and the girl's head looks better than in reproduction. (Still decapitated, but...)
Bound/Unbound (1925) is quite small, maybe about a foot wide. I actually got to hold this one and examine it closely. It reproduces pretty well in print, though.
Parmi les ombres longues (1943) is a medium-sized work that shows much more detail when seen in person than in reproduction. If you look carefully, you can see that the figure is seated in the midst of a desert, with a city far in the distance.

Houston Transit Adventures

I've returned from the Houston trip, which was both fun and productive. On the whole, I discovered that Houston is far more appealing than I might have expected, partly because both the collector who invited me and the colleague with whom I stayed went out of their ways to show me around. The Houston area is very green, which always makes a good impression on me (not that I don't like deserts too), and the weather wasn't even boiling hot.
I did see one glaring problem while I was there, however: wheelchair access on buses.
Since I'm not in a wheelchair and don't currently have friends or family (that I know of) in one, I don't spend a lot of time contemplating wheelchair access. I had not paid great attention to advances in bus technology other than to observe that for quite awhile San Francisco has had "kneeling" buses (I wasn't hugely impressed with how that worked but didn't see it in action all that regularly) and that Pittsburgh buses have a very efficient system for loading and unloading wheelchairs.
On the one day that I took the bus in from Clear Lake to downtown Houston, a wheelchair passenger loaded at my stop, which was a large Park-and-Ride facility. The loading was not all that remarkable except that the bus had to be carefully aligned with a specific spot on the pavement or sidewalk, which the bus driver couldn't really see because the wheelchair door was in the center of the bus. An astonishing number of seats had to be folded up, however.
We were soon on our way, and the wheelchair passenger was soon involved in conversation with another passenger who had been studying her Organic Chemistry. It turned out that both of them intend to go to medical school, so they quizzed one another on organic chemistry and discussed their plans.
The faults of the Houston bus became evident when we reached downtown and the wheelchair had to be unloaded. I was seated directly behind, so I had a good view of all the machinations.
I should note that both the San Francisco and Pittsburgh buses put their passengers relatively close to the ground. There are still steps up, which is what their wheelchair mechanisms eliminate, but the passenger does not feel abnormally far from the pavement. The Houston bus was the kind where passengers sit very high, more as you would expect in a bus with a big luggage compartment under them. It was a little unnerving going on the many freeway bridges and having the sensation of teetering on the edge of a cliff. In any case, the altitude of the passenger area meant that the wheelchair probably had to go up and down about four feet. There was a lot of equipment, there were all sorts of controls, and it was rapidly clear that the driver had no idea how to operate any of this.
The driver fiddled with the controls and the ramp for what must have been close to half an hour before agreeing to get help (we were right by the transit center), which acutely embarrassed the unfortunate wheelchair passenger and made him late for his meeting. Fortunately the few people who were left on the bus at that point were in no hurry, and only one person bothered to get off and walk. I was pretty sure my stop was the next one, but I wanted to see how the incident ended; another passenger said that after spending three hours on an airport runway the day before, spending awhile in an airconditioned bus was no big deal.
The wheelchair was ultimately safely unloaded, but we were all made very aware that Houston needs to improve its wheelchair acess on public transit. I was not at all impressed with the complicated machinery on the bus, but it did ultimately work, so as Houston has already bought these buses, the drivers had better be properly trained to operate the wheelchair lifts. There was no excuse for such an incident.
My colleague, who graduated from my department a couple of years ago and thus knows the Pittsburgh buses well, said that Houston has a considerably younger population and thus fewer people who need wheelchair access. She did not think this was any excuse, but it is why the city has gotten away with poor wheelchair access. We agreed that Houston has got some nice bits of public transit (the light rail in the city is good, assuming it goes where you're going) but definitely needs to expand the light rail, develop more options for suburban commuters, and fix the wheelchair problem.
Our Pittsburgh buses don't seem like anything special (even if they do have multilingual greetings plastered all over them, which is a nice touch), but I have a new appreciation for how smoothly the drivers load and unload wheelchair passengers on a daily basis. Our main type of problem with wheelchairs is that often the 71A inbound can't pick up a wheelchair passenger because it already has one onboard and the bus is packed to the gills with standees. We could use a few more buses on that 71A route, okay?

Bingo Expresses His Opinion

Since I'm about to fly off to Texas to look at some privately owned Toyen originals and other fun Czech modernist items, I thought I had better drop by Animal Rescue League and entertain Bingo for awhile. And, of, course, any other rabbits who chose to be interested.
At home, Ms. Spots takes her daytime nap very seriously, and Orion too is usually sleeping under the couch most of the afternoon. But not Bingo. I don't think Bingo has any preferred nap time. Show any interest in him, and he's ready to get up and go--out of the cage, leaving his scent everywhere possible in the Rabbit Room. The Bingomatic Rabbit is nearly a perpetual motion machine, although he will settle down for long petting sessions after he's run around for awhile.
Bingo's very popular with the rabbit volunteers and has always struck me as a goodnatured creature. Unlike the other bottom-cage rabbits, I've never seen him try to bite any rabbit that ventured close to his cage (today he had Tomas, Maggie, and Babs in a frenzy of territorial aggression).
Bingo apparently does have strong feelings about individuals, however. One person did tell me awhile back that she didn't think he liked her (he warmed up to her during the afternoon, though). Today a young woman dropped by to visit the small animals, and since Bingo was out, she decided to reach over and pet him. To our astonishment, he flew at her snarling! In fact, he did it twice. She said perhaps she smelled too much of cat, and proceeded to make a guinea pig happy instead.
It may indeed be that Bingo doesn't like the smell of cats, but surely he smells cat every day on the shelter workers, and he has no reputation for attacking them. With all due apologies to our visitor, I suspect that Bingo just didn't like her.
Shortly after she left, Bingo settled down for a long and rapturous petting session with a human he knows he likes.

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.

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.

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:

Milt Wolff Memorial

As promised, some photos from Milt's memorial. Actually, most of them are from the graveside from Saturday morning rather than from the public memorial that afternoon. The Berkeley Hills seemed more conducive to photography, although I will say the ILWU hall looked handsome and there were several hundred people in attendance.
Above, Milt's daughter Susan and VALB historian Peter Carroll watch as Susan's husband Guy lays a spadeful over the ashes.

Richard Bermack and David Laub.

David Laub and Sylvia Drake. Below, more of us and a view of the Bay from where we were gathered.




And a photo from the shindig at the ILWU. Conrad Montell, who was a member of the Thursday's Child writing group with Milt and me back in the 1980s, gave my favorite recollection of Milt. After all, everyone in the room knew that Milt had fought in Spain, that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was originally the Lincoln Battalion and the Washington Battalion, and that Milt and the VALB went to lots of peace rallies and raised impressive amounts of money for humanitarian causes. Not everyone knew that Milt loved Dostoevesky and Thomas Mann, was a painter, and liked to ponder the nature of the universe. Conrad knew that side of Milt intimately. (I'm afraid that while I've read a lot of Mann, The Magic Mountain always stopped me dead after a few chapters, so I could never really discuss it with Milt.)
I was delighted to see our old friend Lili Artel, who assures me that she is still writing and making art and getting ready to celebrate her 90th birthday.

Moving Right Along, or So We Pretend

I've safely, if wearily, returned to Pittsburgh. Ms. Spots and Orion were well rabbit-sat and looked very sleek, although Ms. Spots was miffed about my absence and had to be placated with extra-solicitous petting and rubbing of the ears. Orion merely indicated he was glad to see me, and showed me how gigantic he can look in the right poses. (Rabbit who ought to weigh about 6 pounds wishes to emulate those giant rabbits the Germans are sending to Korea...)
In the wake of last week's intriguing horoscope, I feel I should be paying close attention to this one's, which is:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The feats you're pulling off may not appear spectacular to a casual observer. But in my view, they are some of the most interesting accomplishments you've enjoyed in a while. Here's a brief description of some of your subtly glorious breakthroughs: 1. You've made yourself less susceptible to being manipulated by guilt or pushed around by bullies or fooled by phonies. 2. You're getting smarter about how you treat the people and things you love. 3. You're at the peak of your ability to discern the difference between rash risks motivated by fear and smart gambles driven by authentic intuition.

I don't know yet whether I've truly accomplished any of these things, but they sound awfully good.
Now all I need to do is learn to play kecapi, which judging by today's lesson (the first) will be considerably harder than learning to play the average gamelan instrument. It is a plucked instrument, so I thought I might already have some usable skills, but no. Our visitors from Indonesia wanted to know whether I preferred to learn something in slendro or pelog, but it is really immaterial which scale we tune to until I start getting a sense of which string is which and get that multi-finger, two-handed coordination going. I suppose I must have gone through something similar at my first piano lesson, except that I had at least touched a few pianos by then whereas I've only admired the kecapi from a distance. It's somewhat unsettling to feel like I'm five years old again as regards motor coordination.

Still Kicking

It's been a long strange week, and once I'm able to post some photos, I'll say something about the Milt Wolff memorial service and the unveiling of the monument to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (but I may keep all that brief).
In the meantime, I'm pondering the implications of Rob Brezsny's horoscope advice for me regarding "any big educational experiences that promise to dislodge you from your routine." He thinks that "the astrological omens suggest you'll benefit from responding to invitations that just might thoroughly upgrade your world very quickly." Some of these seem to be in the offing...

No Space to Sit in the Bar

As usual, I report from a low-lying slab of granite in the conference hotel, very popular with conference-goers who wish to check their email and can't get a seat in the bar. The granite is a little cold and hard, but at least my feet reach the floor when I sit on it.
I have attended good panels on surrealist drawing and on avant-gardist projects that never really got off the ground. My recently graduated colleague Cindy had what sounds like a satisfactory job interview (not that we can know exactly how satisfactory at this point) and we had an enjoyable lunch. None of the schools I sent applications to confess to doing interviews here, so either they are secretly interviewing other people or else they are just not here. I am not, actually, all that concerned, since there is no urgency about finding a job for next year. The year after that... well, that's different. But I prefer to think about enjoying the conference and finishing the dissertation. And the former involves things like introducing myself to other surrealist specialists, and advising less advanced grad students about getting started on learning Czech.
On the technical front, my laptop is in a better mood today. Last night it suddenly darkened its screen as though I had yanked out the power cord, and then brightened up, which disturbed me until I realized that the pinstriping had vanished from the screen. It then, after behaving itself for awhile, went all dim and yellowish, which caused me to shut it off in great alarm. But I have used it for at least an hour today and it has seemed normal the whole time, so perhaps disaster is not actually imminent.

Reporting from CAA

I have reached the architecturally unexpected city of Dallas and am trying to get myself into full College Art Association mode. I've always enjoyed CAA in the past, but this year it's more of an effort. It is kind of difficult to enjoy much of anything to the full a week and a half before one hopes to turn in a PhD dissertation.
I had hoped (not expected, but hoped) to get a lot done on the plane. Well, my plane's engine was perhaps the noisiest I have ever encountered, which certainly put an interesting complexion onto the inflight magazine's boasts of having drastically cut noise pollution over the years. One can only wonder how loud the engines were before and if permanent hearing damage resulted for passengers who had no earplugs. Anyhow, I did finally crank up the ipod and looked over a chapter.
Originally I had hoped to room with one or more friends, but very few people I know seemed to be going, and they all seemed to have roommates already. I thus decided against the conference hotel, as even at the student discount rate, it was a bit exorbitant. I located a cheap hotel a kilometer or so away.
Well, there was no record of my reservation, but this got resolved. Next, it took several attempts for the desk crew to get my electronic room key set so it would actually open the door. Also, the first elevator I got into was out of order. I was beginning to feel unhappy. However, the room looked fine once I got inside, although other people have pointed out that we don't have wifi in the rooms and that they have wasps instead. (Later on I realized that my room faces a busy freeway, which provides ambient sound 24 hours a day.)
But... my hotel is populated by other budget-conscious conference-goers, which is kind of nice.
On Tuesday night, those of us on the job market had the opportunity to attend a sort of orientation, so I went. It was pleasant enough, but not as useful as I would have liked (I do not need to be told to check in the mirror for dandruff before going to a job interview). The questions asked by some of the audience members did indicate, however, that many people have not been as well prepared for job interviews as those who come out of my department. So, not for the first time, I will offer up my general praise for My Splendid Department, which does most things right as far as I can tell (and usually tries to fix its mistakes). Even had I not done the mock interview last week, I think I would have felt better prepared than some people seemed to be.
Today I have attended a couple of panels - one on Etruscan art and one on Japonisme. After all, when else do I get a chance to go to hear about things that have little to do with my own research? Both panels were satisfactorily interesting. I have always been intrigued by the Etruscans, and the Japonisme panel looked at things like how Japanese artists reacted to European and American japonisme.
In the meantime, however, my laptop screen developed a strange ailment that was not resolved by downloading an updated driver. Namely, while it is legible, it has taken on a sort of odd pinstriped effect that makes text look blurry. I don't know what its problem is or how to solve it, especially since I can really only get internet access when running on battery in one or the other hotel lobby. I think this means I will not want to give my presentation using my own computer, for fear that the display problem will repeat on the projector. It is most irksome and I hope it will not call for some sort of repair.
But, returning to the positive, I have run across several people from my MA program and was able to have a leisurely chat with our slide librarian (not that she deals with slides anymore). I worked in the slide library for two years and have to say that Kathe always provided one of the most pleasant working environments I can remember. Everyone wanted to hang out in the slide library, and I imagine that this is still the case in the new building.
However, work does need to continue on the dissertation, so I suppose I will close up the laptop and wend my way back to my freeway-oriented lair to see what I can get done before anyone else I know arrives and manifests themselves to me.

Travel, Cards, and So On

The Spotted Pair and I have arrived safely at the Parental Lair, although Orion was very unhappy about Travis and my attempts to catch him and put him in the new carrier (Travis kindly gave us a lift to the airport). Orion, to the best of our knowledge, had never been on a plane before, whereas Ms. Spots regards air travel as something she dislikes heartily but which one recovers from in an hour or so.
I have now gotten all twelve job applications off my hands and do not plan to prepare any more this academic year unless something absolutely fabulous comes along. Or so I tell myself. I also finished off yet another postdoc application, and am having that feeling of "maybe this is really enough" and that perhaps I shouldn't bother to do any more this year. After all, if I don't finish the dissertation itself, there is not much use in being offered jobs or postdocs.
Turning our thoughts from matters lapine and academic, there is the year-end sale at Archelaus to contemplate:

Despite our best efforts at cost containment, inflation is finally catching up with Archelaus! As of January 1, 2008, the prices of a number of our fine cards will increase, as will the charges for shipping and handling. This is our first price increase in over two years of operation.
However, you have an opportunity to turn this otherwise distressing situation to your advantage! To rid ourselves of as many fine cards printed with the old prices as possible, we are having a pre-price-hike, year-end, inventory-clearance sale.

Print out a retail order form, get it postmarked by December 31, 2007, and take a 10% discount on your entire order!

Note: If the Archelaus link isn't working, trim out the part of the URL that makes it look like part of this site. The code is OK on my end but Blogger seems to be experiencing a bug.

Another Night in New Orleans

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

Back for a Moment

The rabbits were a bit skittish when I returned from my adventures in Washington DC and New York (Ms. Spots bolted when I opened the door), but they have now calmed down. While both are eager to be petted, Her Spottedness has been exceptionally desirous of long petting sessions this evening. A moment ago she was so overcome with happiness and relief at my return that she licked my hand repeatedly. I feel considerable remorse that I'll be leaving for another near-week-long trip on Wednesday.
I do wish, however, that they hadn't felt compelled to jump on my bed at 4:30 this morning. Their fondness for leaping onto the bed and bouncing around while I try to sleep is a prime reason I usually close the door at night. Surely they don't expect me to get up and feed them before it gets light out?

Furniture, At Last

The movers have come and gone, depositing everything that remained in my storage unit in various parts of the new apartment. (This does not, of course, mean that I have a real phone or internet at home.) Orion and Ms. Spots were mercifully inclined to nap through most of the process, though they did get up and explore from time to time. I got the distinct impression that while they are as fond of novelty as the next rabbit, they have had quite enough changes of habitat in the past few weeks and do not want any more of this.
Unfortunately, they will have to put up with still more. There is a vast amount of unpacking of boxes to do, some of the furniture has to be put back together before anything can be done with it, a new desk will have to be found to replace the one that fell apart on the way out of my bedroom to the storage unit, and so on and so forth. There will be much scanning of clothing and upholstery for signs of carpet beetles, as these abominable creatures staged a massive infestation shortly before I put everything in storage and it is unlikely that I managed to destroy all of them. (So far there have been signs of past infestation, like the shed skins of the voracious larvae, but no noticeable new holes in anything I've examined.)
The rabbits have also had to put up with their human disappearing for two days on a trip to Our Nation's Capital, where an exhibition of modernist photography was about to close at the National Gallery. The exhibition was good and the catalog was purchased, some excellent Thai, Vietnamese, and Indian food was consumed, and the latest designs at Archelaus Cards were discussed. As far as can be ascertained, Ms. Spots and Orion were pretty much OK with having my friend Travis feed and entertain them during the Washington extravaganza. Ms. Spots already knew Travis, but Orion is cautious about new humans, so he was probably non-pettable the whole time. Both were eager to be petted upon my return.