Rabbits Ate My Homework

Chaplin on Veteran's Day

2011-11-12T20:59:00.002-05:00

Veteran's Day has never been a holiday that really captured my attention, given that none of the veterans of my acquaintance have ever paid it remarkable heed. Perhaps it is a holiday of more interest to families of veterans, as Milt Wolff, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II, used to remark upon the fact that his daughter always called him then.

I thought of Milt and of my father this Veteran's Day, they being the veterans I knew best. There was a film festival here for the holiday, and while I had a lot of work to do, I rode my bike over to the Neon to see Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. I've seen quite a few Chaplin films over the years, but I don't think I had seen this one in its entirety before, although of late the final speech has been circulating the internet with considerable vigor. Chaplin's plea for humanity to reject hatred, delivered in the role of a Jewish barber disguised as Hitler-figure Adenoid Hynkel, remains as current today as in 1940. Milt and my father would have appreciated The Great Dictator being shown on Veteran's Day.

A Precise Stylist, or Two or Three or Four of Them

2011-11-10T20:49:00.002-05:00

In drafting our father's obituary, My Sibling noted that in writing, he was "a precise stylist." On the whole, this was true. The long process of determining the final wording of a generally very satisfactory obituary proved, however, that the remaining members of our nuclear family are also precise stylists who all believe that perfection can be attained in the written word.

New Laptop

2011-08-30T10:25:00.004-04:00

Every so often one has to take the plunge and get a new computer. The old one quits, or else becomes sufficiently outdated as to be troublesome. Over the summer, my Lenovo X61, while generally functional, experienced 1) ever-full hard drive; 2) pen permanently stuck in the pen garage; 3) non-revivable battery. None of these things individually was a reason to buy a new laptop, but I had to ask myself how much longer a three-year-old laptop would work and thus whether it made sense to buy new things for it. At first I hesitated, as it seemed there were no tablet-convertibles on the market that offered the combination of features I wanted (large screen, large hard drive, swappable bay for second hard drive), but then I noticed that Fujitsu (maker of my first two or three laptops) had all of that. So I decided that I might as well get the whole project over with and have the new machine ready to go before school started.

While a large screen was one of my major desires--the small screen on the Lenovo has been the bane of my working life as Photoshop (among other things) is hard to use on it--I discovered that Fujitsu's TH700 had everything else I wanted at such an affordable price that I could get a big separate flat-screen monitor to use for Photoshop and watching movies. That seemed reasonable enough. I may use Photoshop a fair amount, but I don't have to do that kind of thing everywhere I take my laptop. It will be rather exciting to have a 27" screen (I bought a highly regarded model from Dell and it has arrived but I have not had time to do more than unpack it).

A friend with a Mac tells me it's a no-brainer to get everything from one Mac to another, and if so that's one of the few reasons I'd consider switching to Macintosh, because it always takes me days or weeks to get things properly set up on a new computer (mine, that is--I can do this for my parents in a day or two since they use few programs and have few files). I'm not sure how much of the time-sink is the searching out all those files and copying them, and how much is making decisions about reorganizing the material. Merely installing the programs I use takes hours and hours each time.

This installation process is exacerbated by changes in operating system. Once the new laptop arrived, I had to deal with Windows 7 and a 64-bit environment. This is taking some getting used to. At least two of my programs, neither of which I plan to abandon, don't yet work in 64-bit as they are complex and made by small companies that don't have huge squads of programmers. I had to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to a fancier flavor so that I could install XP Mode and thus install the said programs. I am still rather inclined to use these programs on the old laptop until the 64-bit compatible versions come out, which I gather should be relatively soon. There's also the matter of how many more times I can "activate" various programs that I've had for awhile, and suchlike.

For now, however, as I have most of what I need set up on the new machine, I may as well compare the two a bit.

Screens: Both have a 12" screen. The Lenovo has a 1024 x 768 resolution, however, while the Fujitsu has 1280 x 800. In other words, the shape is different, with the Fujitsu going more in the wide-screen direction. I don't know how I'll react to that, as wide-screen isn't desirable for most of what I do. The screen quality on the Fujitsu seems better, but I may need to see if I can calibrate the color, as photos that looked good on the Lenovo sometimes look gray-blue on the Fujitsu. This is not something I really want to deal with. Overall, I haven't spent enough time working on the Fujitsu to know how the screen interacts with my programs and tasks.

Keyboards: The Lenovo is the only laptop I ever felt had an uncomfortably small keyboard. I don't expect to have that complaint with the Fujitsu, which is an inch wider. I also detested the fact that the Lenovo keyboard placed special keys, intended to move you through web pages, RIGHT NEXT TO the arrow keys. I don't want to think how many times I hit those damned web keys instead of an arrow key and lost whatever I was typing on a web page. I wasn't opposed to the concept of the web keys (although I never used them), but the placement was terrible. Fortunately I won't have that problem with the Fujitsu. On the other hand, I regret to say that the Fujitsu keyboard also has some odd choices. It has the PageUp and PageDown keys in those locations, which I'm not sure I like as well as the Lenovo's location of these. I may not have any problem getting used to the switch, but more problematic is the fact that these two keys are also the Home and End keys, if you use them with the Function key. I use Home and End constantly when selecting text (or so it seems), and
I really dislike the cumbersomeness of depressing Shift, Function, and Home or End. And speaking of the Function key, the Fujitsu places it where I expect (from the Lenovo, but perhaps also from other computers) to find Ctrl. I keep hitting Function when I want Ctrl, which occasionally has bizarre results. (I will say I like how Lenovo puts everything requiring the Function key in blue.) However, if we speak of Function Keys in the plural (those F1-12 keys that were once so easy to touch-type back in the days when keyboards had them to the left!), I'm relieved to find that the Fujitsu, like most computers, aligns them pretty closely to the corresponding numeric keys. This means I'll be able to almost touch-type them. The Lenovo has F2 starting to the left of 1, so that F8 and F9 are above 7. This meant it was really hellish trying to use these keys, and believe me, I do use them. In some programs I use them A LOT. It causes me pain to watch students and conference presenters laboriously mousing through loads of menus to do things that can be accomplished by pressing (for example) F5.

Touchpads etc: The Lenovo has one of those pencil-eraser-shaped things for cursor movement. While better than a mouse, I didn't like it, as constant use was tiring. The clicker buttons were satisfactory. Thus, I was pleased to get a touchpad with the Fujitsu, although I still regret that Fujitsu phased out its earlier disk-shaped input devices, which were a very comfortable way of moving the cursor. But alas, I'm not sure I'm crazy about this touchpad. In combination with Windows 7, all kinds of weird things happen when it thinks I've gotten too close to it. I've already disabled some special function or other on the left side of the touchpad because my left hand was eternally setting it off. I may need to shut off a lot more things in order to make the touchpad truly usable rather than a weapon of unpredictable disaster. I'm also not crazy about the clicker buttons, which are too hard to find by touch for some reason. I'm always clicking on the edge of the laptop instead, I suppose because it is actually higher than the buttons and I expect the buttons to be what sticks up.

Operating System: I was really entirely content with XP. It was very stable and easy to use; I don't even remember there being much of a learning curve after Windows 98. So, especially after finding Vista a pain when working with my parents' computer, I was not eager to switch to Windows 7 despite hearing that it is considered quite satisfactory. Still, I was curious to see what it could do that I might like. At this point I'm not sure, because on the one hand I was dealing with its quirks most when installing new software, and on the other hand there are a lot of things that may be Windows 7 but on the other hand may be the Fujitsu's touch screen or touchpad instead. I get A LOT of unpredictable weird stuff happening, particularly in terms of things resizing in unwanted ways. Things would gigantify for no apparent reason, so that everything in the browser window with Gmail would be blown up too large to read--even if I closed and reopened the browser, or the desktop icons would bloat so that only about four would fit on the screen, or windows would leap to take over the screen when I wanted them to fill about a quarter of the screen. I was finally able to shut off the Windows 7 feature responsible for some of this mayhem, but it wasn't easy, and as I say that only shut off SOME of it. Also, the Windows Explorer windows are tricky to use. I was used to opening a folder and not having to see the whole directory structure over to the left--well, it's not a big deal to see it, but it takes up space. More to the point, when I'm moving files or folders, I have to be much more careful than ever before. Things really seem to want to go into the wrong place, or something I didn't intend to open suddenly becomes the open folder instead of the one I had very intentionally opened. I don't know if this is the fault of Windows 7 or of the Fujitsu.

Overall shape and contours: Much prefer the Fujitsu. The Lenovo has square corners, which I wouldn't mind except that they invariably caught in my sleeve. One of the first things I ever did after getting the Lenovo was to flip it onto the floor because I hadn't yet learned to move my arms very sedately around it to avoid catching the corners in my sleeves. I found that a very bizarre problem to have. It was partly because the Lenovo is very thin without its base. Let's just say it speaks well to the Lenovo's durability that it survived multiple tosses to the floor. Since the Fujitsu has round corners and a thicker bottom (to accommodate the swappable bay), chances of it catching in my sleeve and going flying are pretty small. Yes, it weighs more, and that's not a plus for portability, but it doesn't weigh all that much more, and I really like swappable bays. So much better than the separate base that I stupidly bought for the Lenovo instead of a plug-in DVD drive. The swappable bay means I can have a second hard drive in most of the time and swap in the DVD drive only as needed, which is rarely.

But enough of all this, classes begin in a week and my syllabi are not yet finished.

A Short Rant

2011-08-09T20:04:00.003-04:00

Generally speaking, it's gotten much easier to submit fiction and poetry to journals than it was back in the ... Distant Past When I Spent A Fortune On Postage. For the most part, one uploads the file (often via a system called Submishmash), writes a brief cover letter, and with a few clicks the piece is on its way. Editors apparently find this easy to deal with as well, since they seem to respond more quickly than they used to (either that or I'm experiencing yet another byproduct of time racing by with increasing speed the older I get). There's also less chance of the submission being lost and requiring a series of inquiries.

Some publications want submissions attached to email, which is usually also pretty easy to handle.

What I do not understand is the desire of a few publications to make life more complicated by demanding that writers submit in non-standard formats. Normally, prose is formatted double-spaced, with contact information, word count, and rights offered up at the top of the first page, and with the author's name under the title, etc. Writers learn manuscript format early on because we don't want to annoy editors/look amateurish. We have our manuscripts neatly prepared and waiting on our computers, ready to upload the moment we decide publication X would be a great place to try.

And then we discover that the said publication wants the story copied into the body of an email. Or it wants it single-spaced. Or it wants no sign of the author's name anywhere. Or it wants a particular font used. Or it wants a bio statement in the same document. Or some other damned thing that wastes time and won't be wanted by any other publication.

Why???

These stipulations don't prevent me from submitting, but they do take time I could more productively use for something else. If the special formatting is in case of acceptance, then why not have me reformat if the piece is accepted? I'll feel much more willing at that point.

End of rant.

End of World Missed By Some

2011-07-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

"There wasn't all that much news coverage of those Millennial types who thought the world was going to end on May 21," remarked My Sibling the other night.
"Didn't it?" inquired my father.
"Apparently I didn't notice," said I.

Unfortunate Associations

2011-07-14T22:43:00.003-04:00

My Mother: I'm cooking stew.
My Father: You're cooking stool?
My Sibling: I'm not eating anyone's stool sample no matter how you cook it.

How Stories Transmogrify

2011-07-12T20:43:00.005-04:00

"Mabel used to cook some strange things," reminisced my father about his aunt. "What was her specialty again?"
"Pudding," said I (I have no clue what else Mabel ever cooked).
"Oh yeah, that's right. What was it she put in the pudding anyway, gopher tails?"

It had always been my understanding that it was roast beef that she put in the chocolate pudding, but maybe they had an excess of gophers on the farm that year. You never know. Maybe the gopher tails were a garnish.

How Writing Groups Go Astray

2011-06-26T12:28:00.004-04:00

Every writing group has its own peculiar character.

Bart turns into a bat and comes to the writing group at Alexis’s. Everyone but Stephanie realizes who the bat is; he perches on the back of the couch and squeaks. Later, Steve turns into a skunk and hides under the couch in embarrassment. Alexis tries to lure him out with a piece of cheese, but Bart eats the cheese. Bart insists on staying, hanging from the ceiling and sitting on the TV while Alexis watches, trying to persuade her to turn the channel to ‘Devil Girl from Mars’. Finally Stephanie brings lentil soup and he vanishes, leaving the apartment deep in guano.

Steve will leap out from under the couch and grab hold of Karla’s leg, refusing to let go until she lets him sleep in the bilge.

Some writing groups are more peculiar than others, of course. This was my third writing group. We often laughed uncontrollably about something called The Kitty Picture; just what The Kitty Picture was, I can no longer quite recall. I imagine it was a work of sentimental art retrieved from a garage sale, but perhaps I am mistaken and it appeared suddenly on a tortilla like a votive image of Elvis or the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Preparing for the Near Future

2011-06-25T08:13:00.001-04:00

Here's what Rob Breszny had to say a couple of weeks ago:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
I dreamed you had been tending an unusual garden for months. Your crops weren't herbs or flowers or vegetables, but rather miniature volcanoes. Each was now ripe and stood about waist-high. They erupted with a steady flow of liquid blue fire that you were harvesting in large, gold, Grail-like cups. Apparently this stuff was not only safe to drink, but profoundly energizing. You sipped some of the potion yourself and distributed the rest to a large gathering of enthusiastic people who had come to imbibe your tasty medicine. The mood was festive, and you were radiant. This dream of mine is a good metaphor for your life in the immediate future.

I was unsure whether this is about my students or my writing. Perhaps it's about both. If it was very immediate, however, I think it was about my students, both those who graduated and those who will return next year.

Fragment: On Grief or Resignation

2011-06-24T08:43:00.002-04:00

With a certain stoic interest, he sat near the rail watching his mother float away as she stood in her long dress in the smaller, furl-masted sailboat, as though she were a figurehead entering an unknown port. Later, when he had grown up and left the sea, he stood in the center of a dusty road and watched his wife's car disappear down the straight; and it seemed to him very much the same.

(No, I'm not sure you can say furl-masted when it's the sails that are furled rather than the mast, but no better phrasing has ever come to mind, either 23 years ago or now. And no, I'm not sure exactly what caused me to write this, although I have a general idea. I would change a few words now, perhaps. It has a different meaning for me now than it originally did.)

Dragon Fails

2011-06-23T19:49:00.004-04:00

For the most part, I have Dragon rather well trained to take dictation, but it does require proofreading, especially on people's names and on words like "suppurating" which have a way of appearing as more common words like "separating." Every now and then, however, something truly perverse emerges, like "we behave with unusual incompetence sadistically yet without to obviously changing our outward habits."

That was supposed to be "we behave with unusual and complicitous decorum yet without too obviously changing our outward habits."

Ancient Limericks

2011-06-17T17:55:00.004-04:00

A lady who looked like a cat
Used to go out and sit on a mat.
She wondered quite soon
"Should I bay at the moon?"
And her neighbors all wondered at that.

A boy who resembled a dog
Used to play he was dead as a log,
Until one day his dad
Quite enough of him had
And made him get up and go jog.

There once was a monstrous big tanker
Who when pulled by a tug did not thank her,
So the tug said "You bitch!
You belong in a ditch!"
And straightaway stove her and sank her.

A beggar asked me for a dime;
I said "Here, go and have a good time!"
He said "Not on your life,
This all goes to my wife,
Who's locked up for committing a crime!"

When on Earth will Sidebar Cafe Get It Right?

2011-02-27T09:15:00.003-05:00

Neighborhoods such as our downtown historic districts need good cafes. This seems pretty obvious to me--when you have a good cafe, people go and hang out and spend money. Both of the neighborhoods I lived in in Pittsburgh had good cafes--Shadyside had several reasonably good ones along Walnut, and Highland Park had the exceptional Tazza d'Oro. (All of these are still thriving since my departure, I might add, despite the grim economy.)
When I arrived in Dayton, I was gratified to find what seemed like the Dayton version of Tazza d'Oro, a place called Pacchia's. The coffee was good, there was a fine selection of pastries and breads, there was an adjoining restaurant serving lunch and brunch, and it was clear everyone in the area went there. In the evening it also served beer and wine, so it was the perfect place to stop with friends after a movie at the Neon. It was not quite on the same level as Tazza d'Oro in terms of cafe food, but it was about as close as I could reasonably expect.
In January 2010, however, Pacchia's rather silently changed ownership. At first all that was noticeable was that the cafe closed for a week for some counter remodeling. The new counter was supposed to make things more convenient, although I thought it was less so than the original one.
Gradually, I became aware that the restaurant side--which had been quite a popular destination as well--was closed and that the cafe no longer served beer and wine in the evening. People coming in for brunch were sent away and told that they could get sandwiches at the deli down the street. The restaurant side gradually became off-limits to cafe patrons, meaning less seating in the morning hours, and there were usually people over there discussing remodeling plans. For a long time people didn't know what to call the place other than "the place that used to be Pacchia's," so finally staff began to tell us to call it the Sidebar, that it had been bought by a downtown bar by that name.
For the first few months, it wasn't all that different beyond the lack of brunch. I think people were fairly optimistic that the new management simply had to get things off the ground. The cafe began to serve some pretty good sandwiches.
Around the time I bought my house, the cafe closed for yet more remodeling. I can't remember whether this was at the same time as the restaurant side reopened--probably. At any rate, it reopened with a completely different wood floor (staff said they thought this one would be easier to clean than the previous one, which I thought pretty unlikely *I've just heard that the new floor is vinyl, so that's why*), a completely new and expensive-looking counter area, and a yellow-orange-green paint scheme. Now, I wouldn't say I dislike the new counter area visually, but the old one was much too nice to get rid of, and the old paint scheme was far better. (I heard a fair number of customers comment on how they disliked the new paint; I can only remember hearing one say he liked it.) The restaurant area was also remodeled, moving the bar from one corner to another for no discernible reason. Basically, the remodeling seemed like a major waste of time and money, done only to emphasize that this was Sidebar now and not Pacchia's.
One day when I was hauling stuff over to the new house, I had a craving for one of the nice new sandwiches the cafe had been serving. I've forgotten whether it was tuna or chicken salad. In any case, I stopped in, only to be told that if I wanted lunch I had to go to the restaurant side. Mildly embarrassed, I sat down. I was in work clothes, fairly grimy, and this was all sparkling white tablecloth, with nothing under $10 on the menu. The food was excellent, but the ambiance was hardly what I had in mind.
After the restaurant opened, people continued to come in on weekends hoping for brunch, but the restaurant wasn't serving. Nor is the cafe open in the evenings anymore. The cafe no longer served the sandwiches, and the pastry case was utterly gone, so that instead of a tempting array of lemon bars and muffins (the sunrise muffins had been excellent), you were lucky if you could get a bagel. Coffee customers ceased to have a choice among skim, regular milk, and half-and-half; fortunately I prefer half-and-half since that's all there is now. Honey and the shakers of chocolate and spices disappeared. The new layout also means that the employees often forget to put out napkins or jackets or the half-and-half; I still, months later, regularly hear them complain of not knowing where to find things.
Recently the cafe began serving breakfast items like breakfast sandwiches and waffles. I was delighted to notice this when I stopped in on my way to school, and decided I'd give this a try on Sunday when I'd have a stack of grading to do. I biked over with my quizzes and papers, heartily looking forward to the new menu, only to be told that they don't serve breakfast on the weekend. Supposedly "only about five people will ask for breakfast or lunch today" and to get more would require expensive advertising, so it wouldn't be worth it.
Stunned by this strange logic, I pointed out that most people who want something don't bother to ask if it looks like it's not available; they just get something else or leave entirely. (Usually I get a bagel, but I didn't see any, so I just got coffee instead of the planned breakfast.) Besides, in a neighborhood cafe there's no real need to spend any money advertising; all you need to do is put a sign on the door or a chalkboard on the sidewalk announcing you've got something new and exciting on the menu.
It's no surprise that fewer and fewer people go to the cafe. The groups I used to see nearly every time I came by rarely seem to meet in the space. I'm guessing that some of them may go over to Ohio Coffee Company now, which is the closest place I know of but not very close to my house nor, last I checked, open on weekends. I like Ohio Coffee Company quite a bit, it's just not all that convenient for me, being somewhat more downtown.
If I go down to the University of Dayton area, there are several options in the form of Panera, Starbuck's, and the relatively new cafe Butter. The two chains are pretty good, but I prefer to support local independents when possible. Butter has very good breakfasts--I really like their Paris Omelet--but for the price there ought to be potatoes with the omelets (you'd get that for the same price even in an expensive city like Berkeley), the coffee is marginal, and the waitstaff doesn't seem fully trained yet (often they forget to bring the coffee until well after the food arrives, and friends and I have encountered other such faux pas). But in any case the UD area isn't remarkably convenient for me, even though I can bike there so long as it's not snowy or raining.
In sum, I'd say the Oregon District, St. Anne's Hill, and northern South Park are thirsting for the ideal local cafe. In my opinion, that's a cafe with good coffee, teas, and free wifi, a nice selection of bagels and pastries, which ideally serves soups, salads, and to some extent sandwiches and egg-based things. It should be good both for take-out coffee and for lingering (those who linger reading or grading tend to end up buying more food and drink).
It's my understanding that the Sidebar restaurant is very good--and that's a fine thing--but while I might go to the restaurant once or twice a year (I haven't been yet other than the one lunch foray), I'd be spending a much more reliable stream of cash on bagels, muffins, sandwiches, soup, and the occasional omelet. I don't think I'm alone in this. Alas, it seems clear that Sidebar's owners are really only interested in running a relatively fancy restaurant and have no clue (or don't care) that they could earn quite a bit serving the community with a better cafe.

Regrettable Discoveries

2011-02-25T19:59:00.001-05:00

In a moment of obsessiveness, I thought perhaps it would be a good plan to get up to date on exactly which dissertations I had downloaded (over the past couple of years or so) for future reading. After all, most of them have file titles made up solely of numbers, which is not very informative at first glance.
The danger inherent in a project like this, of course, is that one can't resist starting to read, and it would be better to read and grade student papers, or read something for fun. But when I saw that one of these dissertations had a chapter on Devětsil, I didn't see how there could be any harm in reading just that one chapter, in case I learned something new and exciting.
Yet I am feeling unhappy rather than excited. While overall the chapter has reasonable things to say--it deals with Devětsil as a precursor to the main topic of the dissertation, which I will refrain from mentioning here as a courtesy to the author--it is riddled with unfortunate factual errors.
First off, the author calls surrealism a late phase of Devětsil. This is either backwards or just wrong, depending on how you think Prague surrealism came to be. While the original Prague surrealist group did more or less emerge from the ashes of Devětsil, the two groups were not the same. Nezval liked to claim that Devětsil was an embryonic stage of Prague surrealism, as when in 1934 he told Jindřich Chalupecký that Poetism (an aspect of Devětsil thought) was "latent surrealism." Very few members of Devětsil, however, became surrealists. Devětsil was over and disbanded by the time the Prague surrealist group formed.
Next, the author calls Josef Váchal a Devětsil poet. This startled me considerably. Váchal was a writer as well as an artist, but he was pretty independent and for that matter really the wrong generation to belong to Devětsil. Váchal was born in 1884 and the vast majority of Devětsil members were born around 1900. Váchal was more of a Symbolist or Decadent. It is possible that the dissertation author's source on Váchal was misleading (there is plenty of incorrect information published in English on Czech modernists), but it would not have been difficult to look up a well-known figure like Váchal, especially if one reads Czech, which apparently the author does.
The next unfortunate moment involved the author's failure to pick up on 1920s popular culture references. Namely, that the Jiří Voskovec picture poem Skyscraped Doug refers to Douglas Fairbanks. I don't think that this would have bothered me unduly had it been a lone bit of ignorance; I certainly don't claim to know what everything in Skyscraped Doug is all about either. But Douglas Fairbanks was an honorary Devětsil member and the photo in the lower right corner is definitely of him, never mind that I couldn't say what the precise source of the photo was or if the work refers to a specific Fairbanks film. The author was puzzled why "Doug" would appear, and this is something that shouldn't have been hard to track down.
Alas, the muddling goes on. Jan Mukařovský is identified as a poet as well as a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Reading that, I thought "Did I somehow fail to notice that Mukařovský was a poet?" However, a quick jaunt around the internet suggested that if Mukařovský ever wrote a line of poetry, it was probably during his teens. Oh well. The author then confuses Jan Neruda with Pablo Neruda by stating that Mukařovský's quotation of F.X. Šalda's words about Jan Neruda at the beginning of "Poetic language as a Functional Language and as a material" was Mukařovský's praise of Pablo Neruda's poetry. I'm sorry to say this, but we both read the same page in English in the volume On Poetic Language (1976) and even if it might be all right to naively confuse the dead Czech writer (subject of Mukařovský's academic thesis) with Mukařovský Chilean contemporary, it's pretty sloppy to take the Šalda quote, which Mukařovský uses in discussing poetic use of unlovely language, for Mukařovský praising anyone.
I didn't notice any other errors in the Devětsil chapter, fortunately. I hope the author was more careful in checking the bulk of the dissertation, because it's on a topic I'd like to learn more about.
And I certainly hope that no one reading my own dissertation is finding any lamentable obvious errors of fact there. I daresay there are probably a few, but I hope they are few and forgivable.

And We Go to CAA...

2011-02-10T08:20:00.004-05:00

It being February, it's College Art Association time again. The agony (sometimes) of choosing among sessions, and all that.
For the opening set, I was torn between a panel on Pre-Columbian art (after all, I don't know much about it, and CAA is a good opportunity to sample the less-known-to-me) and a panel on The Afterlife of Cubism. I was less interested in hearing about cubism given that I already know a fair amount about it, but last quarter I taught a course on cubism and other heavily abstracted or nonobjective movements, and it went well enough that I think I'll repeat it, so I felt this was a panel that would directly benefit my teaching.
My reaction to the lineup of papers was that it looked rather francocentric, but the first paper, by David Cottington, introduced the audience to cubism from Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on Czech and Polish cubism. As introductory papers go, it was well done, and posed some interesting questions about how we should theorize cubism in its various forms and locations. Still, it didn't really tell me much of anything new. I've read most of the English-language literature on Central and Eastern European cubism, after all, as well as a certain amount in other languages.
Papers on Gris and Léger went into much more depth, and I particularly enjoyed the exploration of Gris, but when we reached Sonia Delaunay-Terk, suddenly we were back to the introductory. At that point I began to get angry. Why is it that in a standing-room only panel on the Afterlife of Cubism, canonical artists like Gris and Léger get (naturally) the in-depth, subtle analysis while we're still on ground floor with cubism outside France and with a fairly canonical female artist like Delaunay-Terk (or Terk-Delaunay)? Delaunay-Terk is an artist whose obscurity ended thirty years ago, for heaven's sake. There should be no need to present introductory papers on her at CAA, where all of the modern specialists and a large percentage of the other attendees ought to be familiar already with everything that was said about her Wednesday. We should have gotten as in-depth a look at her work as we got at that of Gris and Léger and Miró. As for the Central and Eastern European cubists, it is true that they are not as well known as ought to be the case, but modern specialists ought to be aware by this time of at least the major names, particularly those of the Czech cubists, who are the best represented in English-language scholarship.
There was, unfortunately, time for only one audience question, but several of us did comment to David Cottington that it was time for a panel focused on the Central/Eastern European side. As my roommate commented later in the day, the art-historical literature in English is still fairly introductory and it's time to start dealing with some of the issues broached by Cottington.

Camera!

2011-02-05T16:44:00.002-05:00

Long ago, well before the advent of digital cameras, I owned a couple of very nice manual cameras. (No tedious batteries or anything!) One was a Brownie box camera that used 620 film, and the other was a Praktiflex FX. While neither was really intended for flash photography, and in fact I never attempted to use flash on either one, each was an excellent camera in its own way. But alas, just as I was getting serious about photography and experimenting with printing black-and-white, both cameras were, to all intents and purposes, destroyed. (Let's not talk about that any further.)
Eventually I bought a decent-quality Yashica, but I never became very fond of it. I didn't get the same quality of candid shots looking straight through the Yashica as I had looking down into the Praktiflex, and while I enjoyed having flash, I disliked relying on batteries and being lured into using the automated point-and-shoot mode. Around the time I bought my digital camera, the Yashica developed an ailment of some sort and it has been awaiting a trip to the repair shop ever since.
It eventually dawned on me that while I had never seen another Praktiflex anywhere, all manner of things surface on E-Bay. And indeed, Praktiflex cameras do show up on E-Bay with some regularity, although not always whole or in good condition. I decided to get another one. This was easier said than done, since I don't really monitor E-Bay and almost never buy anything that way, but eventually I put in a bid on one.
I might add that I was feeling some urgency about getting one, as the digital camera had (as far as I can tell) given up the ghost while I was visiting Chicago recently.
Now, this weekend I have generally been feeling miserable, as I had papers to finish grading, a large batch of exams to grade as well, and I was beginning to feel as though I was an extremely incompetent lecturer after seeing how few students managed to identify any of the exam works fully (or even to follow my verbal instructions to place the IDs before the essay portions). It is not a good thing when you have a student who writes "Donatello" for every work whether it is Sainte-Chapelle, a page from the Très Riches Heures, Giotto's Madonna Enthroned, or a Jan van Eyck. (Why this student is obsessed with Donatello, I cannot imagine. If she likes Donatello so much, she should be able to tell that he had nothing to do with any of these other works.)
All that in mind, imagine my joy at discovering a box on my (very snowy) doorstep, in which resided the new-to-me Praktiflex!
It is not strictly identical to my former one. I knew before buying it that it has a different lens. The old one was a Zeiss and this one says Westenar. However, lenses can be swapped, and this lens may be quite satisfactory. The thing now is to get some film into it. And, of course, these days the question is where one buys film. Since there are two professors of photography in my department, learning where to buy film will not be a problem.

Only Two American Literary Cultures?

2010-12-13T10:37:00.006-05:00

In the recent article MFA vs NYC,Chad Harbach discusses what he sees as two distinct literary camps or directions in contemporary American fiction. (I link to a short version in Slate while the full version is in N+1.)
Harbach begins with a nod to Mark McGurl's 2009 study, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which analyzes the role of writing programs in postwar American fiction. McGurl's book posits that writing programs have "generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison" (that's from Amazon's product description; I have yet to read the book itself). I hope McGurl doesn't really claim that Nabokov was a product of American creative writing programs, but we'll let that pass.
Harbach himself argues that there exists a self-perpetuating MFA-writer culture centered on short stories written by MFA-grads and published in literary journals, and that the successful MFA-grad becomes a professor in yet another MFA program, thus permanently bypassing any need to earn a living by writing. This type of fiction writer lives in a different world, and publishes for a different audience, than what Harbach calls the NYC writer--the presumably equally serious fiction writer who publishes novels with mainstream New York publishers and (according to him) usually lives in New York.
Harbach doesn't really praise one camp over the other, and maybe that's not so surprising, as Harbach is an MFA-grad and an editor at the literary magazine N+1, yet now belongs to the NYC world as in February his first novel was sold at auction for "about $650,000." While the MFA writers are busy writing short stories that are read mainly by other MFA writers, the NYC writers are cranking out novels that must hook the reader on the first page or so and that the entire book-reading population must find easily digestible. On the other hand, the (few) most successful MFA-writer stories are anthologized repeatedly, whereas novels published by mainstream presses have a short lifespan these days. In other words, either route has its plusses and minuses. If you're a successful MFA writer, you have a secure income from your teaching and your stories appear in various journals read by writers scoping out whether those journals might publish them. If you're a successful NYC writer, you have an insecure income, but more people read you when you bring out a new book.
This neat binary doesn't, of course, entirely describe the world of fiction writers. It has nothing to say about commercial fiction, or about genre fiction of a more literary bent. Writers in those categories seem to live all over the US but either publish with mainstream NY presses or in small, independent, magazines.
As a writer who hasn't fit into any of these camps or categories, I'm not wild about how anything about the American literary world functions. I've published in the same literary journals as the MFA people (although it was probably harder for me back when the MFA world was gaga over dirty realism), and I've published in small genre magazines (although not much of my work qualifies as genre fiction). I write novels that aren't about New York and I've never wanted to live there. Furthermore, now I'm in the convenient position of making a living in academia without teaching in a writing program. This has the advantage of feeding my imagination in ways that don't involve a steady diet of student fiction, but the disadvantage that my job requires a lot of work, which takes time away from writing fiction. Well--while I'd like my fiction to count toward tenure, which it won't, I like having to think about other things academically.
Some writers prefer short fiction, others prefer novels. In the latter 20th century, novelists usually first published some short fiction as a means of developing skill, but they knew there was no longer any money in the short stuff. Today, in a literary world where novels published by established houses are supposed to make an immediate splash or die, there is almost an opposite pressure: a competent writer will find at least a few journals willing to take on the short fiction, but agents and publishers are no longer as open to novels that can't be hyped and rapidly sold to a fairly large public. Harbach seems to conclude that we should all write short fiction for one another, yet isn't that a rather odd conclusion from a writer who spent nine years writing his first novel and then had the good fortune to sell it for a big price? We are not all going to settle down to teach writing to undergrads who want "undemanding classes," and while I agree with him that being a professor is a cushy job in comparison to freelance copyediting (something we have both done for a living), he seems strangely unaware of how few people these days actually get tenure-track jobs.
Ah well. Back to my day's course-prep labors, so that I can feel free to write fiction tonight, or perhaps send out a few query letters.

This Season's Exam Oddities

2010-11-30T10:22:00.004-05:00

I realize that I have been lax in posting... anything... of late. That's what happens to busy assistant professors, I'm afraid. However, exams always provide a regrettable amount of humorous material, so here we have a selection of the most peculiar. In defense of my students, who actually (despite the following evidence to the contrary) put in some hard work and generally seem to have learned a lot this quarter, I must say that many of them seem to have gotten through high school with a level of spelling and historical knowledge somewhere around what I had achieved by the end of fourth grade. They're smart people and they do learn, but they're not what we might call well prepared.

The intro class exams really had lots of intelligent and interesting things to say about the Etruscan sarcophagus from Cerveteri... until the exam that identified it as "Iktinos and Kallikrates, the Parthenon, on the Akropolis, Athens, marble, 447-432 BCE." HUH? Mindboggling...

On the topic of misidentification, let's get it straight that the Taj Mahal is not Greek, and the Hagia Sophia is not Etruscan. OK?

I was also disturbed by the number of students identifying the Parthenon as "Roman, in Athens." On the subject of the Parthenon, which was paired with the Roman Temple of Portunus (aka Fortuna Virilis), we learn that ‎"Both of the buidings are almost cemetricall to themselves..." and "The Parthenon is regarded often by scholars as being the endearment of the classical doric style." Furthermore, ‎"The Parthenon was one of many parts of a surrounding 'kingdom' like area and was a temple used to celebrate battles won. The goddess athena is well known in mentioning the Parthenon. The Pantheon [Temple of Portunus] no longer exists." Hmmm.

My students remembered quite a bit about the purse clasp from Sutton Hoo, although a remarkable number of them claimed it includes emeralds (to the best of my knowledge it does not, but it has garnets and enamel). However, my lecture remarks about the Celts' and Anglo-Saxons' westward movement returned to haunt me in the form of "The scott-saxhen was a culture that was being push farthier back into the islands of which is now Great Brittan, by the Roman Empire."

Last fall's class had some odd things to say about the Augustus of Primaporta, and this class did too:

"His bear feet again refect divinative and solidarity. He is antipostal and marble, the matirial which made Roman sculpture what it is."

"He does not have a hateful look on his face but one of a normal man."

‎"In Roman culture, normally men with power had robes on." (As opposed to powerless men, who went about naked?) "He is 'cute'."

"He was strong, powerful and had Love on his side."

As an "unknown" work to discuss (one they have not previously seen but which is similar to some that they have), I provided an Early Medieval manuscript illustration from the British Isles. Usually students do pretty well on unknowns, since I'm mainly looking for visual analysis and reasoning, but this one prompted some sad evidence of historical and religious confusion:

‎"...the book the man is holding looks like it could be a bible. The abstract features suggest it is of an earlier time period in BCE. The man [...] looks as though he is portrayed to be Jesus..." If he's Jesus, he's not BCE. Logic, logic, logic?

‎"This could also be the cross that is seen on the ceilings of some Jewish synagogues with Jesus in the center." ?!@%! Since when do synagogues have pictures of Jesus anywhere?

‎"This peice seems very similar to that Roman, Islamic style of priests and saints." And what on earth style is that?

Finally, on a late paper from the same class: "Eros embraces his mother softly with his feathers and humbly near her gastrocnemius." ???

Writer Personalities.

2010-10-29T09:13:00.004-04:00

It's being a busy fall and I've got about 70 papers to grade in addition to a conference paper to write, lectures to prepare, and all the rest of it. But I ran across this rather clever blog post by Lydia Sharp at Writers Unboxed, on categorizing writers according to the personality of their working methods. I'll just say that I am definitely the candlestick maker.

Now if only I really had time to devote to those projects instead of having to grade 70 papers (even though so far they are looking like pretty good papers)!

Publishers Weekly and the Self-Published

2010-09-13T14:36:00.003-04:00

Publishers Weekly recently announced its plan to begin quarterly coverage of self-published books, stating that in the past twenty years self-publishing has "produced an explosion of new authors and new books." According to PW, "Nearly 800,000 books were produced in the U.S. last year and were characterized by Bowker as 'nontraditional.' Much of this was self-published and POD." Since "They are books and that is what PW cares about," PW is launching PW Select, "a quarterly supplement announcing self-published titles and reviewing those we believe are most deserving of a critical assessment."
The first supplement will appear in December 2010. The supplements will list all self-published books submitted to PW during the quarter, and 25 (or more) of those titles will be reviewed. There will also be discussion of publishing trends and resources for the self-publisher.
Well, this is an interesting development, and comments from self-publishers have already made for two opposing camps, divided by reactions to the fact that these listings and reviews won't be free--PW charges $149 for a listing and doesn't guarantee a review.
The authors who excoriate PW for charging to be listed (and not guaranteeing reviews) regard this as a huge ripoff, yet another sign that PW is part of the publishing establishment and has no genuine interest in self-published books. Well, I don't think PW would ever argue that they aren't part of the establishment. A review in PW, even a bad one, is pretty much a guarantee that the book will sell. If it's a badly written celebrity book with an unrealistically large advance, it might not earn out its advance, but it's still going to sell. Yet the move to cover self-published titles indicates that PW does have a genuine interest in books from outside the mega-conglomerates. A financial interest in them? A perception that this could be a cash cow? That's harder to say.
It's well known among savvy writers that there are people and organizations out there that make plenty of money out of writing contests. Most writing contests do charge an entry fee, and the fees range from nominal to not-so-nominal. Some of the contests are highly respected and some are just machines bilking the naive. My point here is that the fact that a contest charges an entrance fee is not in itself unethical, it's how the contest is run.
Now, if last year's figure of 800,000 books published in the US is any kind of average, it ain't rocket science that PW has no way of reviewing them all, whether listings are paid or free. PW does not review all that many books in its regular weekly issues, it mainly lists the books. PW is a hefty trade publication and I doubt that most subscribers have time to read all its articles, let alone sift through all the individual listings.
As a writer who may at some point choose to self-publish, my reaction to a $149 processing fee to be listed in PW (which, incidentally, includes a 6-month subscription to the digital version of PW) is that sure, it's burdensome. Many writers don't have much money. But the poorest writers are not self-publishing on paper. If they're self-publishing, they're likely to be doing e-books, which aren't currently eligible to be listed anyway (why not, I'd like to know?). Someone who is self-publishing a traditional physical bound book is spending much more than $149 in production costs. If you're going to put money into producing the physical objects, which will then have to be housed somewhere (your living room?), you'd better be willing to put some additional money into marketing them. Paying $149 to be listed in the industry's major organ may or may not prompt anyone to notice the book, but if you're serious about your work, isn't it a sensible gamble? The face of publishing is changing, in some ways unpleasantly but in other ways perhaps for the good. In some ways writers have less control and fewer options than in the past, and in other ways they have more control and many more options. When it comes to book publishing, the author who opts for self-publication has to make many choices, and the choices that fit one person's work may be unsuitable for another's. It's my guess that some types of book will never benefit much from exposure in PW, but in general it seems to me that self-publishers should not be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Gmail Wants to Prioritize My Mail?

2010-09-12T10:29:00.004-04:00

Too much email? Google wants to start prioritizing our Gmail for us.
As a person who gets far more email than I can reasonably read, let alone make sense of, I had to take a look at this, albeit with a feeling of deep skepticism. Google says:

"Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages you’ve deleted.

When you click the Priority Inbox navigation link on the left-hand side of your mail, you’ll see messages grouped in three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else. This is the default setup, but you may customize your sections on the Priority Inbox in Settings.

If Priority Inbox mistakes an email as important or doesn’t flag one that’s important to you, you can teach it to make better selections. Just select the message in question, and click the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” button; they’re the buttons with plus and minus icons just to the left of the Move to and Labels drop-down menus. "

Sound good? Well, I'm not so sure. It's going to prioritize people I email most frequently? Well, that sounds okay--obviously they must be important to me for some reason--but wait a minute, isn't it often more important to hear from people I rarely exchange email with? Friends I usually talk to on the phone or in person; relatives emailing to let me know someone's in the hospital; people I care about but lost touch with before email was available; journal editors and literary agents I might later have lots of contact with; genealogists who want to let me know I've made an error in my family tree... the list goes on.
How's it going to use opening email versus deleting as a signal? I often open email just because it's easier to get at the delete button from an open email. Or because I know I can quickly glance at it and file or delete it, whereas something more important has to wait because I know I'll need time to think about it.
I get a lot of mail from several academic email lists. I want to get this email--I subscribed to these lists, after all--but not all lists are equally interesting or equally urgent. Moreover, not all mail from a given list is equally important. I delete announcements about conferences happening two days from now in Germany, but I sometimes want to know about British conferences happening in two days, even though I can't go. I'm not going to propose a paper for next year's conference on Renaissance or Japanese art, but I might forward the announcement to someone who would. I don't see how Gmail is going to make very good decisions based on what I happen to open from my academic and software email lists.
Supposedly this prioritization process is going to be most helpful to people who get lots of email (I think yes for some, no for others), and for the email-bombarded who are willing to spend a lot of time upfront marking what's important to them. Hmm. I use voice-recognition software for certain projects, and that's something you certainly have to train in order for it to work well, but voice recognition software trains by becoming more familiar with the user's voice and by being corrected when it misrecognizes words. This mostly works pretty well for me because my voice doesn't vary hugely in dictation and because I dictate on projects that have a large but relatively consistent vocabulary. I avoid dictating on projects that involve a lot of foreign words and names, such as transcriptions of old lecture notes, because when I've tried that I spend too much time correcting words I'm only ever going to dictate once or twice, versus merely occasional use of foreign words. I think my incoming email is probably too much of a weird conglomeration of types of things to be effectively filtered for anything but spam.
On the other hand, I'd like to see Gmail develop better ways to filter incoming mail by topic. It does have labels, which I use a little bit; it doesn't have folders, which I'd use if it would only admit that labels aren't a substitute for folders. It needs more robust ways of searching for unread mail. I need, for example, ways to search for all those genealogical inquiries that came in on days when I had way too many other things to do; I'm interested in answering those people and at the same time those usually aren't quick emails to handle so they tend to get left till later and rapidly forgotten.
I'll be curious to hear whether people who start using the priority inbox find it works for them.

Defining the Quiet Novel

2010-09-11T18:13:00.000-04:00

Every now and then I've seen the term "quiet novel." Not all that often, because I don't read huge numbers of book reviews or much literary criticism, but from time to time people will describe a book thus. I never thought about it--it seemed like an ordinary enough way of referring to a book, just as one might call a book "lively" or "rumbustious."
Awhile ago an agent commented to me that quiet novels aren't selling well these days. I was a little dubious about that because only a given percentage of the novel-reading population prefers books that are filled with adventure, excitement, and car chases, and the book to which the agent referred didn't strike me as terribly quiet. It featured sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, tears, accusations, theft, and theater. I granted, however, that agents are more in touch with the publishing world than I am these days. In any case, I still took the term "quiet novels" as a simple descriptor.
But then my friend Betty referred to "two very quiet 'portrait' novels" that she felt were similar in tone to one of my projects. More references to quietness? (Let's not get into "portrait" since presumably any reasonably reflective novel revolving around one character could be considered a portrait.) I began to wonder whether "quiet novel" was a genre rather than a mere subjective description. I did a Google search.
Most uses of the term that came up seemed subjective, although fairly congruent with one another.
An Amazon customer review of Anita Shreve's Sea Glass begins "Anita Shreve's latest book, "Sea Glass," is a quiet novel that deals with the universal themes of life, love, loss, hope, beauty, tragedy and death." The fairly in-depth, very positive review ends by saying that the book has "no great surprises and no great suspense. It doesn't delve too deeply into the minds and hearts of the characters involved, but then, we don't always want something that's earthshaking."
In "The Virtue of Quiet: "Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn," Dan Hartland writes, "Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is a quiet novel. [...] very quiet." He mentions, on the whole very favorably, "the book’s peculiarities: a focus on the internal, a modesty of style and of ambition, and a dry, sardonic humour." He notes that while the book's moderation and passivity mirror those of the protagonist, this unity is intentional and the book is, in fact, full of incident. So it's not a book where nothing happens and everything revolves around the protagonist's navel.
Hilari Bell, discussing suitable and less suitable ways of writing of novel climaxes, refers to books in which "The climax doesn't match the story. You see this most commonly in a quiet novel about tangled relationships...that ends with a car crash (or a kidnapping, or a natural disaster) and the protagonist suddenly finds herself struggling for survival."
Lynne Griffin's blog post "Literary Lingo Recap," which nicely defines various current buzzwords used by agents, simply defines a "quiet novel" as a literary novel, especially one without a strong plot. (She defines literary novels as usually being more character-driven than plot-driven, and more about the writing than the story, which is a common definition of literary novels in texts geared toward commercial fiction. There are, however, many books fitting that description that more "literary" readers would simply call mainstream novels.) While I think that overall Griffin's definitions are useful, this one just doesn't cut it for me. Lots of literary novels would never be called quiet, including some that aren't terribly strong on plot. A picaresque literary novel, for instance, is unlikely to be either quiet or (by definition) plot-driven. Literary novels cover a lot of ground, after all. There are literary novels with strong plots, nonexistent plots; with experimental narration and with traditional narration; with deep characterization and without much focus on character; the main thing is that a literary novel is not a commercial novel, although occasionally one may belong, to some extent, to one of the genres typical of commercial fiction, and of course every now and then a literary novel is a commercial success. Should we distinguish between a genre called the literary novel (which might be mainly quiet novels) and what's known as literature (Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, Wuthering Heights) when we're not using the term literature to mean sales brochures ("I'll leave you some littachur") or academic writing ("the literature")?
The blog post Shantaram & the idea of a Noisy Novel mentions the quiet novel somewhat as a foil to noisiness. The blogger opens with a conversation had with a novelist friend: "We were talking about what it was that publishers might be wanting at the moment, and she told me that the days of the quiet novel were largely over." The blogger continues, "I take the quiet novel to mean a beautifully written, often short-ish narrative in which not much happens. Stylism is the quiet novel's main event: plotting is barely perceptible, characterisation is but a ripple on the surface on the writer's prose. The focus is often on transactions of a personal, intimate nature between a small group of people living within a softly-spoken coo-ee of each other." (She then discusses noisiness and hyperrealism, mainly in the context of the Australian novel.) This prompts some good reader comments on quiet versus noisy, and the blogger's response that "Jane Austen and Jeanette W[interson] weren't exactly what I had in mind as examples of the quiet novel, tho the quiet novel has links with a tradition of quietism focusing on the personal, domestic, intimate life etc. However, both JA and JW feature strong characterisation and elements of social or aesthetic analysis. Also -- most of JA's novels *are* strongly plotted. [...] Whereas the quiet novel, at worst, is often more like a collection of loosely-related scenes." After a few more reader comments, she says "I think the point is just simply to do with strong vs weak narrativisation, and whether it's time for a revival of strong narrative, which is possibly more allied with pulp fiction and film at present." So for this well-read and intelligent blogger, a quiet novel is likely to be a dull and poorly plotted thing that by definition doesn't really grab the reader. This is not someone who equates "quiet novel" with "literary novel;" rather, she wants lively, strongly plotted novels that are better written than Shantaram, a book about which she has mixed feelings.
Confused by so many different, even if somewhat related, uses of the term "quiet novel," I asked Betty what she thought. Was it a genre or a subjective evaluation? What was her personal understanding of the term? Even if it wasn't going to be clear exactly what everyone else might mean, at least I could find out what Betty meant in relation to my own project. Betty responds:

Quiet novels to me are those written with emotional and intellectual constraint. A quiet novel keeps the reader on an even keel because the style tends toward calmness. Events may be very dramatic, but they're described with restrained prose so that the reader isn't feeling emotionally pulled. Stimulating and challenging questions may arise, but because they're written with understatement, the reader doesn't feel stirred up intellectually. In quiet novel, I as a reader, feel more like an observer. This doesn't mean I'm not drawn into the story or that I don't emotionally connect with the characters, but rather that I'm not experiencing it with great dramatic pulls. I feel compassion for characters, but the writing doesn't make my pulse race or my body twitch. My heart doesn't break although I understand the heartbreak the character is feeling.

Betty cites some comments on specific quiet novels: "[Peter] Taylor as always writes in the most measured, calm manner, so that the surprises and the humbling human understanding he so effortlessly throws in seem barely to ruffle the surface." (Kirkus Review)
"A Summons to Memphis is like a leisurely port wine sipped slowly and with pleasure beneath a blackjack oak." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
"Serious, beautiful and affecting, what makes Stoner so impressive is the contained intensity the author and character share." (Irving Howe) ". . .[T]he passion of the writing [in Stoner is] masked by coolness and clarity of intelligence." (John McGahern)
Betty concludes:

I hope that gives you some idea of what I mean by a quiet novel. It's no doubt true that unless you're already a well established literary personage, then getting quiet novels published today is likely more difficult than getting "less restrained" work accepted for publication. Wolf Hall, for example, pushes and pulls the reader emotionally and intellectually. There's nothing subtle about Mantel's writing. She writes with visceral descriptions that can make you ache from the pain she's inflicted on a character. The opening scene is extremely dramatic, steeped in physical cruelty. This, I think, is what the publishing world is saying the public wants.
I, of course, don't think that's necessarily so.
There are likely many variations on how to understand what quiet means, but I hope this gives you a better idea of what I was referring to.

And yes, that gives me a better idea what at least one reader has in mind. Whether Betty will continue to think the tale is quiet, and whether others will think so, remains unknown.

More on Novels and the World of Work

2010-09-06T16:59:00.003-04:00

Awhile back I posted some ruminations on whether recent literary fiction has much to say about work. It wasn't my own observation that literary fiction tends to bypass work, and I hadn't previously thought much about it, but my literary friends are showing a tendency to disagree with the notion that literary fiction does not deal with work. Betty Dietz, for example, writes:

I'm not so sure that work has fallen out of favor in novels over the past twenty years. I think the opposite is true. I think that in literature now more characters are engaged in specific jobs and that their employment is used as theme, for character development or, at the least, as an important point of reference on which the story is built. Off the top of my head and from the stack of most recently read novels, I've thought of several books that use work as an integral part of their character and/or thematic development. In Stoner, John Williams immerses his protagonists in academia (the University of Missouri in Columbia). A Summons to Memphis, by Peter Taylor, is the story about a rare book collector and editor who is the son of a lawyer, and the brother of two sisters who are real estate managers. In Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee, the story is told by a biographer researching a book about the writer John Coetzee who has died--it's a fictional autobiography. The researcher interviews five people and each of these people have specific jobs that are relevant to the telling of the story. Coetzee's Disgrace is about an academic who loses his job because of a scandal involving one of his students. The Stain by Phillip Roth is also about an academic. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is about Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer who worked his way up from being the son of a blacksmith to being the chief adviser to Henry VIII. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer is about a businessman who spends his weekends and holidays being a gentleman farmer in South Africa. A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry drags us through the trenches with a WWI soldier.

I could think of more, but that's enough. Work, I think, is an important component of contemporary literature[...]

It must be confessed that I have not read a single one of these novels; I am hoping that I'll have somewhat more time to read fiction in the coming years, given that graduate school is over. The fact that Betty has read these is a recommendation in itself. In any case, perhaps the essay upon which I originally commented drew on an idiosyncratic pool of novels. Further thoughts from readers are encouraged.

And Where Did They Go?

2010-09-04T18:36:00.004-04:00

Most of my home gardening this summer has involved pulling weeds in the back yard and attempting to keep the container plants watered, but today's temperatures miraculously dipped to the 50s and 60s, so I was able to spend several hours in the yard without either heatstroke or death by mosquitos.
I had the pleasure of finding two of these in the front garden:

Since they were eating a vine rather than milkweed, I assumed they were Swallowtail caterpillars rather than Monarchs, and since there are numerous types of Swallowtail, that's not impossible, but this Wikipedia photo of a Monarch caterpillar looks more like my guests than any of the Swallowtail photos. The plant, they were devouring, honeyvine (Cynanchum laeve), is apparently one of the few non-milkweeds Monarchs will eat.

I was going to photograph my striped tenants in their full glory, but when I returned with the camera an hour or so later, they were gone. I hope they were merely napping out of sight and not eaten by birds.
Speaking of birds, a hummingbird came by around the same time to check out the blossoms on a coleus I had just repotted. The other day I saw a bright yellow bird of finch-like shape in the back yard (I have no idea what it was).
And there are many types of butterfly and bee visible in the yard at any given time.

Still Not at all Dead

2010-08-19T17:34:00.002-04:00

Can it be this long since anything new has gone onto the blog? Shocking, just shocking. Well, the house has been bought and moved into, more or less, although very few of the books have been unpacked and there are various projects to be undertaken before the upstairs gets much use. The usual summer trip to California has been made, and will result in about 160 boxes plus miscellaneous furniture being shipped here, probably arriving just in time for school. Ah well, life is a project.

Garden Tour

2010-06-27T14:25:00.004-04:00

My new neighborhood does a biannual garden tour, so as I didn't yet have keys to the house, I spent my Saturday looking at gardens and introducing myself to yet more neighbors. Most of the gardens are relatively small--from a few feet wide to about the size of my future back yard--but considerable care and imagination went into them.

The tour included, for an extra $5, a restful tea break at the local mansion. And when I say mansion, it genuinely is one, but a mansion rehabbed just like everything else in the neighborhood. We have tiny cottages, medium-sized houses, and a mansion or two.

It's been hinted that I should prepare my garden for the next tour. Since I'll have two years to get ready, I suppose I might manage it. We'll see.

St. Anne's Hill Trash-N-Treasure

2010-06-20T08:49:00.002-04:00

On Thursday I closed on my new house, and Saturday was the annual neighborhood sale in my new area. St. Anne's Hill is fairly famous for the quality of its neighborhood sale, so I was eager to see what I might find for the new house. My current neighborhood had had its sale a couple of weeks earlier, and while I hadn't seen much activity there (and had also promised to take a colleague to the Cincinnati airport), I had nonetheless managed to pick up an antique table and chair, some wooden cigar boxes, and a stack of 1950s magazines for well under $150. Who knew what wonders might await me at the much larger St. Anne's sale?
I was over at St. Anne's, coffee in hand, at the very start of the sale, but unfortunately it had begun to rain while I was picking up the coffee, so for the first hour or so everyone was tarping their wares. That is, everyone except those selling out of a garage, porch, or living room. But most of what I saw to start out was under a tarp. This made it tricky. I didn't see anything I wanted in the first hour or so.
On the other hand, it was also my mission to introduce myself to my new neighbors. The historic districts have very active neighborhood associations, so it made sense to make myself known. This part of the morning went very well. Everyone was welcoming, and many of them were familiar with my house. Some of them had even already heard of me. I heard (not for the first time, but it's a good story) all about how the man who renovated the house back in the early 1980s ordered wallpaper specially from England for it. It's probably still something of a challenge to order wallpaper from England, but let's keep in mind that there was no email or internet then. The wallpaper in my downstairs is part of the city's historic house lore. The house is also one that people are very fond of. Even the various home inspectors and roofers went into ecstasies over it, which I am sure they cannot bring themselves to do over every house they see.
As the weather began to clear, I began to find things I actually wanted. Some had already sold, but mostly not. I could also have gotten a beautiful 1920s stove-and-oven for free had I had a means of carting it away (the owner said it was free to whoever could carry it away first)--I don't actually need a stove-and-oven, but I would have used it as a decorative piece in the dining room (the white Hoosier cabinet there is departing). However, I knew I had no way of carting it, and another enthusiast, who has a store on 3rd and thinks he can fix the recently defunct oven, arrived with a truck while I was chatting with the owner.
I am not entirely sure what-all I got, as it is nearly all sitting in the car, but the haul included two mirrors, one large rug, a Czech perfume bottle by my favorite glass manufacturer (whose name I can never recall), a lamp, a batch of Celtic and jazz CDs, seven plants, a wicker chair, some tins, and a sack of excellent homemade tamales. I met up with three members of my department in the course of my wanderings, and they too acquired exciting items. We were very pleased with ourselves by the time we parted in the early afternoon.

Yellow Springs Street Fair

2010-06-19T17:34:00.004-04:00

Last week's Yellow Springs Street Fair experienced considerable rain early in the day, but fortunately things dried off by noon or so. It was similar today at the Saint Anne's Hill neighborhood sale.

Warning: Characters at Work

2010-06-05T21:22:00.000-04:00

Subsequent to my post on fictional characters and their ways of earning a living, I find that my mind keeps meandering back to this topic. Whether in any productive way, I'm not entirely certain. But it's seeming like an important thing to think about.
This may, of course, simply be the result of my own history of earning a living in numerous ways. It would be a fine thing if I had forced myself to take notes on the minutiae of all the different jobs I've had, but of course that always seemed just intolerable at the time, even when I recognized that I ought to be noting the peculiarities for future reference. So often, one's gainful employment is largely a matter of getting through the day and getting the paycheck, even when one has taken on less than appealing jobs in order to benefit one's fiction. Besides, I am one of those people who isn't really very good at taking detailed notes, because I only jot down the most vital ideas, or else only what strikes me as new information. This means, among other things, that I don't have vast quantities of notes to draw upon when preparing art history lectures, but it also has its effect on my recall of how the various offices and factories of my working life operated.
All the same, my recall is probably sufficient, aided by spots of internet and library research, to provide convincing employment for some of my characters. It's important to get into that mysterious trance-like state where things float to the surface, and I'm pretty good at telling my conscious mind to go play somewhere else while I encourage things to come together. I'm all in favor of whatever works.
In the meantime, Wikipedia has done a fine job of educating me on the workings of the diesel engine and other things that I never really understood very well.

Titles from Hell

2010-06-03T18:56:00.000-04:00

It being near the end of the school year, my students and I would all like to be let loose. That and the hot weather are probably responsible for my spewing forth yet more book titles that do not correspond to any book I ever hope to write. (It's so much harder coming up with titles for books one actually does want to see in print.)

Downcast and Dreary
The Damned are Among Us
Saints and Their Specialties
Does Your Dog Talk?
Why Do Fish Sing?
Clouds Over the Hill Fort
Sands of Destruction
James and the Salubrious Bat
How to Build Your Own Ziggurat
The Big Book of Interfaith Baptismal Rituals
Cannibals for Supper
The Land that Freud Forgot
You Will Go to the South Pole
Of Dreams and Dadaists
Rodchenko Photographs a Dam
Why Is Your Child Deranged?
Insignificant Others
Love in the Age of Big Oil
Of Monopolies and Mutants
Raising Vipers in Your Own Home

Further Perverse Titles

2010-05-31T18:43:00.000-04:00

Some of us can never let well enough alone, so after my rediscovery of so many silly imaginary titles from so long ago, I could not rest without inventing more.
I do not claim that they are actually any good. In fact, I am sure they are not. Some of them, however, were inspired by actual titles on my shelf. (Special bonus points to readers who can point out those inspired by Roman Jakobson titles.)

Land of Oblivion
Oblivion for Fun and Profit
Profit Will make You Fat
The Joy of Fat
File Clerks of the French Revolution
Significant Chasms
What Is Sex For?
The Meaning and Wonder of Modernism
Symbolic Slovakia
Balkanization for Medical Practitioners
Decades of Doom
Recognizing Global Catastrophes
Tears in Literature
My Futurist Anxieties
Utopian Territories
The Power of Euphemism
Aircraft Carriers I Have Known

Perverse New Titles

2010-05-30T18:27:00.003-04:00

Rummaging through a very, very old folder, I ran across a list of titles for imaginary books. I'm not sure what was on my mind when I invented them, but they include the following:

Geese Before the Tide
Depression in the Andes
Foxtails in My Heart
Buzzards in the Snow
Fame and Loathing in Xanadu
The Magic Eraser
Shards of Tranquility
Cathedrals In Space
Arachnid Enteritis
Forgotten Are the Fallen Few
Fewmets in my Tea
Martine Goes Shopping
Famine Comes on Wednesday
Meditation for Money
The Menhir in the Moon
No Time for Noodles
Tantalus in Turkey

...and a boxed set:

Good Titles I Have Known
Good Titles I Have Written
Good Titles I Have Forgotten

Why We Have Little to Say

2010-05-10T20:54:00.003-04:00

Just in case anyone was wondering (we have ways of knowing), things have been excessively busy around here of late, what with about 80 midterms to grade, project proposals to comment on, lectures to prepare, and an unhappy rabbit who's supposed to have ear drops three times a day. The ears are allegedly getting worse instead of better, so now she has to accompany her human to school twice a week in order to be sure of proper dosing on school days.

An Old Photo

2010-05-05T08:59:00.005-04:00

I just (without even looking!) discovered this on the National Historic Register's Flickr site. Unfortunately I don't have a date for the photo, but if you click on the link you can read about the neighborhood's history.

Update: the National Historic Register reports that the photo is from 1985.

Front and Side

2010-05-02T17:35:00.002-04:00

There has been a desire on the part of some readers to see the front of the house. I think I have finally gotten some satisfactory photos, although there always seems to be one car or another parked in front.

The next photo shows a glimpse of the front yard. The said front yard is not big,but it does have some nice plants started.

This is the view from the side yard looking across the street.

At this point, my life is mainly centered on grading and other school-related tasks (plus giving Ms. Spots ear drops every day), since there is not much for me to do house-wise until nearer to closing.

Modernist Housing

2010-04-21T11:48:00.003-04:00

The students in my 1850-Present course have turned in proposals for their modern house projects, in which they invent a client or clients who commissions a spiffy house.
We have:
An Art Nouveau house probably situated in Brussels
A house in Barcelona inspired by Gaudi's Park Guell
An Arts & Crafts house in Dayton, Ohio
A Prairie School house in Springfield, Illinois by Frank Lloyd Wright
A Prairie School house in Springfield, Ohio for the son of former governor Asa S. Bushnell (whose mansion is nearby)
A Prairie School house in Albany, New York, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
A Cubist house (group is large, may need to split and do two houses)
A 1950s Southern California house for a wealthy bachelor, complete with music room
A mid-century house in Pacific Palisades (also Southern California) influenced by the work of Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, and Charles & Ray Eames
A mid-century house in Greenwich, Connecticut for a French fashion designer
This sounds good to me, although I am sorry not to see any Art Deco in the mix.

Relaxed Alertness

2010-04-20T22:25:00.003-04:00

I made an offer on the recently pictured house and accepted the counter-offer. Mortgage stuff now underway and inspections scheduled. Meanwhile:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I have compiled a set of four affirmations that I think will keep you on the right track in the coming weeks. Try saying them at least twice a day. 1. "I am cultivating Relaxed Alertness, because that will make me receptive to high-quality clues about how to proceed." 2. "I am expressing Casual Perfectionism, because that way I will thoroughly enjoy being excellent, and not stress about it." 3. "I am full of Diligent Indifference, working hard out of love for the work and not being attached to the outcome." 4. "I am practicing Serene Debauchery, because if I'm not manically obsessed with looking for opportunities to cut loose, those opportunities will present themselves to me with grace and frequency." (via Freewill Astrology)

While I try to live like this in general, I think a little more Serene Debauchery could be beneficial. Ms. Spots is the most skilled practitioner in the household and has Orion and me wrapped around her little toes. All she has to do is lie down and someone is likely to rush over and fulfill her wishes. Admittedly, at times she gives one or the other of us a special come-hither look. But she doesn't have to in order to get her message across. On the other hand, when it comes to Relaxed Alertness, Ms. Spots excels at Relaxed while Orion excels at Alertness. The full weight of Casual Perfectionism and Diligent Indifference is on me, since the rabbits don't work.

More Photos

2010-04-16T17:54:00.006-04:00

Readers have expressed much interest in the house pictures, although mostly not via the blog. This afternoon I had another opportunity to photograph the said house (we are preparing the offer), so here are some of the better photos.
Below, the front parlor fireplace.

The front parlor has two sets of pocket doors.

View from the bathroom into the kitchen:

The anaglypta ceiling in the kitchen:

A corner of the dining room:

Dining room cupboards:

The back stairs and pantry door:

The laundry area:

West upstairs room:

East upstairs room:

The lilacs and dogwood in the back yard:

The garage:

A Strong Possibility

2010-04-14T09:48:00.005-04:00

The house-hunting game is nearing its end, or so we hope. There are three or four top candidates, each structurally sound (as far as can be ascertained pre-inspection) and each with many appealing features. None of them looks much like any of the others beyond being two-storey and having a yard of some sort.
I have not succeeded in getting many photos, as my camera batteries have been unreliable--evidently the rechargeables are nearing the end of their rechargeability, and I suppose I've recharged them quite a few times by now. Still, I do have at least a few passable pictures of one of the houses, although not of every room.
The photo below shows the first room one enters. While I sort of like the wallpaper, I think it is a pattern better suited to a smaller space, and if I bought the house I think I would do something else, although not necessarily right away. I am more a paint person than a wallpaper person, but I'm open to new possibilities.

The wallpaper seen below, in the front parlor, is wallpaper I expect I would keep. I would never have thought of doing it myself, but the forest of exotic birds has considerable charm. The front windows (facing east) let in pretty good light and so the main question is whether to lighten up the ceiling. Both rooms seem like fine places to put bookcases and pictures and the piano I intend to get. Note the area with couch seen through the door in the second photo: it leads to the stairwell and the couch is under a window, making a potentially good spot to sit and read. I wouldn't object to having a little couch like that, assuming it was comfortable. I would change the color in the stairwell but it should continue to draw the eye.

The kitchen, below, is small but seems very well laid out. I like the cabinetry, which is ample and at good heights for me to reach. There is a window over the sink and everything seems convenient. A window to the left of the sink provides somewhat of a view of the magnolia tree in back, if I remember correctly. The kitchen also has a very fine white anaglypta ceiling.

The dining room, which was the original kitchen, provides additional storage space and if I should embark on making piecrust I would probably do it there. The south windows provide good light and look out onto the side yard and the neighbor's garden. I would put in an anaglypta ceiling to match the kitchen's and ask if the cabinet in the corner could stay.

At the back of the house one finds a utility room with washer, dryer, and plenty of space for rabbit gear. It is a sunny and pleasant room suitable for starting seedlings and lying around petting recumbent rabbits. (Any seedlings would have to be out of reach of the rabbits, obviously.) While I am not a big fan of yellow walls, they work well with white trim and I think I would keep the current color scheme and only perhaps do a lighter shade.

The upstairs was, except for one room (not shown), originally attic space but now has three rooms plus walk-in closets. One of the closets would need to become a bathroom, but I understand that there is sufficient space for the conversion. The bedroom has its enchantments and could accommodate some bookcases, but I am unsure what I would do with the color scheme. Fortunately the current colors would be acceptable for a start.

The eastern upstairs room is not ideal for bookcases, or at least tall ones, but other than that it could be a very pleasant place to work. The yellow patterned wallpaper, while not something I would ever have chosen on my own, actually works well in the room and I might keep it.

Not shown: the downstairs guest bedroom, the bathroom, the upstairs west room (potentially a fine place to read or watch films), the basement, and the yard. The front yard, typical in the historic districts, is very small and mainly has flowers and some shrubs. The side yard has a walkway and some plantings, and the back yard has a small patio, a larger grassy area, a big magnolia tree, several white lilacs, some roses, and miscellaneous other plants. It has space for fruits and vegetables and composting.

My Students in Action

2010-04-11T09:32:00.002-04:00

At least three of my students (possibly more?) were creating art for everyone to watch during last night's big arts fundraiser. I was impressed with their work, less impressed with the results from my cell phone camera. Maybe I really do need a pocket-sized digital camera too. There was no way I was going to take my big camera to something like that.

Things We Like (and Don't)

2010-04-05T15:47:00.000-04:00

Since I've now signed a contract for tenure-track employment, it's house-hunting time. After all, if I want to get that $8000 first-time buyer tax credit, I've got to sign a house contract by the end of the month.
Real estate is plentiful around here, and it's pretty affordable as real estate goes. While I gather that McMansions in the suburbs are wildly expensive, those are of no interest to me anyway. An interesting house with a yard, within walking distance of places to eat and other useful businesses, is what I have in mind. Proximity to a bus stop and/or freeway is also good.
Books and articles about real estate always talk about what sorts of renovations and upgrades add value to a house. I find I am only in partial agreement with the prevailing wisdom. I do agree that it is wise for the seller to make some cosmetic fixes that make a place look appealing. But I'd rather see things like freshly planted annuals than a remodeled kitchen or bathroom. While I'm not likely to be drawn to something that looks like a wreck, I'm also not likely to buy something that's just been fixed up with whatever someone regards as the latest decorating trend, whether it is low-end or high-end.
What would I like to see as far as updates? Well, I am all in favor of good insulation. I did not enjoy seeing my heating bills this past winter, especially since I spent most of my hours at home either wrapped in an alpaca cape or wearing layers under three insufficiently warm blankets. I would also be all in favor of a European-style tankless water heater. And I would be happy to see some solar panels even though this isn't the sunniest part of the country.
What don't I want to see? I certainly don't want to see new carpeting. If the carpeting is cheap, I'm just going to want to rip it out, and if it's expensive, I'm still going to want to rip it out but I'll feel like I have to use it for years first. I have no objection to buying a house with old and ugly carpet, because rabbits like carpet and they can enjoy racing around on a nasty carpet while I figure out whether the flooring underneath is desirable. Carpeting, in my view, is basically a magnet for dust, fur, and moths. It's also never in a color I want on my floor. It may be an inoffensive color, but it is still never in a color I really want. Rugs are the solution here. I will pick out my own rugs, thank you.
I have alluded to my general desire not to see remodeled kitchens and bathrooms. As far as I'm concerned, they can have plumbing and cabinetry from 1890, 1920, or 1950, so long as the plumbing actually functions. I will then have the option of keeping it or updating it according to my own preferences. I grant that one does see some very appealing updates, and at times I respond favorably, but very often my reaction is "That's nice, but I don't want it." I cannot count the number of elegant bathrooms I've seen lately, all of which have brown tile. The first couple of times I saw this, I was impressed, because admittedly it's good-quality tile, and furthermore, I wasn't used to seeing brown bathrooms, so it had a certain novelty value. I've now realized that every bathroom in this city remodeled within the past five years apparently has the same brown tile. Designers in this city have a thing for brown, in general. I do not. None of my towels go with brown. Brown is not a color I'm anxious to see first thing in the morning. I've concluded that while I could go for a brown-and-black half-bath off my living room, I don't want a shower lined with this ubiquitous expensive brown tile. I can get my brown bathroom fix every time I stay in a conference hotel or go to the local restaurants and cafes. I mean, some years back I complained because my apartment had pink tile, circa 1960. Yet it was surprisingly easy to make the pink tile work, since it didn't clash with most of my towels or with my shower curtain or with either black or white. I will be perfectly content to deal with pink, blue, green, lavender, or even (possibly) daffodil yellow tile in my bathroom. Black or white tile is also acceptable. Just say no to the trendy brown bathroom, please. I do not want to see any more of those, any more than I want to see any more household objects or clothes that combine brown with blue, with pink, or with turquoise. By 2007 I was thinking "ugh, that's so last year" and I am not inclined to that kind of dismissive thinking.
In the same way, I'm concluding that there are certain styles of kitchen cabinetry that, despite being perfectly nice in themselves, are just far too ubiquitous. Unpainted wood cabinetry is attractive when new, but it does not do well with moisture. I do not want to spend my life checking for water stains on my lower kitchen cabinetry. Nor do I want to have exactly the same millwork as everyone else has installed since 1990 or so. Thus, do not install new cabinetry to sell your house to me, unless you are magically on my wavelength. Nor should the prospective buyer put in new countertops or backsplashes unless these are just unusually exciting. Even then, my reaction may well be "Great workmanship. Hate the color."
In sum, if the house dates to 1890 and the exterior and fireplaces are lovely examples of that era, I just do not want my kitchen and bathroom to scream "2000" or "2010." They need not look precisely 1890-ish, but they should not look as though 1890 and 2010 have been mysteriously grafted together and the fruit of the two will be 2010. Let the building give some sense of having a gradual development from 1890 to 2010, or else of being the result of the efforts of a person with a strong personal sense of design.
I can tolerate the trendy of decades past (at least temporarily); I do not want the trendy of today haunting me until it's decrepit enough to justify replacement.
Now: while we're at it, I have not been excited by any of the child-centered decorating I've seen either, since it distracts me from envisioning what I might want to do with the child's bedroom. That's not a major issue because all I'd really have to do is tear off the decals and repaint, but I'll point out that I've only seen one example of a child's room that really took my fancy. A friend of mine bought a house with beautifully done Beatrix Potter characters painted in one room. I'm not sure children are ever allowed near, but it's a divine guest bedroom. I'd hire that painter. Maybe I'll need Beatrix Potter characters on my own bedroom walls.

Another Czech Art Course Begins

2010-04-03T13:56:00.002-04:00

It's Spring Quarter and that means (among other things) that the Czech Modernism class is underway again. Last year it was an advanced seminar designed to teach students how to write research papers. This year it's a lecture class with fewer readings but weekly Discussion Board postings and a design-an-exhibition project. And 30 students instead of 6.
Libuše, 1893, by Karel Vítězslav Mašek (1865-1927)

Rabbits Wonder About Their Human, As Usual

2010-03-28T21:54:00.005-04:00

Ms. Spots and Orion would like to point out that their human has been pretty unreliable and sleepy of late and has made many strangely enthusiastic remarks about grading and how much better the students have done than last quarter, and especially about how stunningly they did on the design-a-cathedral-or-mosque project. Ms. Spots and Orion feel that the human's time would be much better spent paying attention to whether there are enough greens in the refrigerator, although Orion was pretty excited this evening to discover that the human was too mentally deficient to realize she had poured tasty pellets into the litterbox instead of litter.
Ms. Spots and Orion have also gathered that the human has been offered a permanent sort of job and that instead of moving to climes unknown this coming summer, the plan is to move somewhere within a mile or two that will offer space to compost all that used litter and grow lettuce and cilantro. Given the looming deadline to file for the first-time home-buyer tax credit, the human has had to take up house-hunting as well as all those other time-wasting, non-lapine-oriented activities. Fortunately there are some photos to be had from this insanity.

Publish, Perish, or ....?

2010-03-18T11:02:00.004-04:00

This just came in the mail. Looks like a step in the right direction. Since when does quantity equal quality?

ERIH and Art History - a joint resolution of RIHA

RIHA, the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, sharply criticizes the clandestine way in which the European Science Foundation (ESF) has developed and monitored the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) since 2001, and is extremely concerned about its present and future application.

See:
http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/erih-european-reference-index-for-the-humanities/erih-initial-lists.html

Following discussions at the General Assemblies in Rome (Nov. 6-8, 2008) and Ljubljana (Nov. 6-7, 2009), RIHA has adopted the following resolution on November 7, 2009:

1. The qualities of scholarly work in the humanities cannot be assessed in simple numbers or metrics; principles which were developed in the context of the natural sciences cannot be transferred to or employed in the humanities, since these work differently, in particular with regard to the relevance of research for different audiences or readerships, and its impact on these constituencies.

2. RIHA strongly opposes the idea that, in the field of art history, the place of a publication (in a journal that has been assigned to category A, B, or C) is indicative of the quality of the individual article or contribution.

3. The categorization of journals does not reflect the needs of scholars. RIHA will not deliver data to ERIH or to any similar quantitative indices of research quality that can be used for assessing the quality of individual scholars, departments, or institutions.

4. RIHA strongly opposes the idea that a specific number of articles in any journal can serve as a means to establish the scholarly potential of a candidate for career promotion (as practised, e.g., in Poland).

5. RIHA strongly deplores the current practice of linking directly the funding of a research institute to the number of articles published by the staff of that institute. RIHA considers this practice to be meaningless with regard to the quality and impact of an institute's daily work.

6. All RIHA member institutes hereby declare that they will never use ERIH data for assessing the quality of applications for grants and fellowships, research projects, or for temporary or permanent positions as staff members. Rather, they will rely on specific criteria appropriate to the individual case.

7. RIHA strongly urges all European art historical institutions (museums, galleries, universities, cultural heritage organizations etc.) not to use ERIH, and to lobby their respective ministries to ensure that ERIH is not employed at local, regional, federal, or national level.

How Do Fictional Characters Earn a Living, Anyway?

2010-02-20T19:39:00.005-05:00

The author John Lanchester observes that very little fiction these days deals with work. Back in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, quite a bit of fiction did. Lanchester notes that the oeuvres of Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and other writers of the time have a great deal to say about the working lives of the characters, whereas today one mainly gets a sense of characters' work in police procedurals and women's popular fiction.

This intrigued me. I hadn't really thought about it, other than to occasionally ponder my own characters' relationship with work, which has largely had to do with whether their work (if mentioned at all) was personally meaningful or merely a means of support. This is similar to how Lanchester describes women's popular fiction, despite my not being a writer of that (rather broad) genre. Is this because I'm female? Surely women aren't more concerned than men about whether their work is meaningful. Still, I've never thrown work and employment into fiction purely on the grounds that nearly everyone 16-70 or so works in some fashion (paid or not) unless unable to. It has to bear some relation to the story.

Lanchester thinks that the general lack of literary fiction dealing with work is due to the complex nature of so much of what we do for a living these days. He says:

"Television can give us a cartoon version of a barrister’s work, or a forensic scientist’s work, or a doctor’s work; for a fuller and more real version, the writer would have to do a huge amount of explanation of the complex realities of their different working lives. But you can’t explain in fiction, not like that and not at the necessary length."

There's some truth to that. We don't generally want great big long explanations about much of anything in our fiction these days; we don't even usually want descriptions of rooms or scenery to go on for more than a sentence or two. Yet people do like to learn about things and to find out details. To quote Lanchester again,

"I’d been reading about how most countries used to drive on the left, because it’s the logical side to get on a horse for right-handed people, and about how almost all the countries that still drive on the left had a strong British influence and are islands. I was mulling over these things and then it struck me: this couldn’t go in a novel. A novel with a disquisition on the difference between driving on the left and on the right would be… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be in a hurry to read it."

Here, I think Lanchester isn't reckoning on the ways in which a crafty novelist could incorporate the said disquisition. It could be done quite interestingly, given the right story and characters. Someone like Jaroslav Hašek's Švejk could have discoursed on it most amusingly. Hašek wasn't exactly the average modern novelist, but I'll bet you that I too could get a character to expound on the topic without boring readers to tears. (All right, I don't think I'm the average novelist either.) I think that a major reason we don't have many literary novels today dealing with people's working lives is that writers are hesitant to write about either work they've actually done themselves or work they've had no personal experience of. I don't think fiction is really devoid of descriptions of the kinds of entry-level jobs most of us have had, but we don't usually (I think) write about our office jobs, factory jobs, or academic jobs. If we're still in those jobs, we tend to worry what might happen to us if the book is a success (if it's a short story, there's little cause to worry since no one from work is likely to discover it, but short fiction offers less scope for writing about work). Christina Stead's House of All Nations was, if I remember correctly, written while she was working in banking but not published until later. I don't think most people would have the nerve to publish something like that while relying on a paycheck from the source of the material.

Lanchester states:

"The world is full of interesting things that don’t fit inside traditional fictional forms. That is because a novel has to seem true. It doesn’t have to be factually or literally true and the kind of truth it seeks can be fantastical, wild, unearthly, illogical, dreamlike, incoherent, even mad — but it does have to feel true."

This is indeed the case, but I think that usually one has to have a good (often current) sense of a job or workplace in order to convey that feeling of truth. I suspect writers often block out the wonderful weird details of our recollections of jobs past because, of course, we feel that writing is our real job.

Geography

2010-01-22T20:28:00.004-05:00

The first quiz of the quarter indicates that my survey students nearly all studied and paid attention in class, although of course not to an equal degree. That's not to say they scored remarkably well, but it was clear that most of them had a pretty good grip on things even if many people got the Annunciation confused with the Visitation and that sort of thing.
I'm afraid, however, that most of them do not know much geography, despite my showing maps and pointing out where things are. This was glaringly obvious in the two most geographically oriented questions.
It was not so terrible in the case of the question of which Tuscan city-state, rival to Florence, was the home of the painter Duccio. While few people correctly filled in Siena, most of the answers were Italy-related: Venice, Rome, Assisi, Pisa, and Milan were popular choices. Not correct, but not bizarre. The answers Italy and Tuscany were more strange, indicating that those people weren't clear on the concept of a city-state versus a country or region. When I saw "Vienna" and "Bohemia," however, I was perturbed.
I suppose it was stupid of me to include a question (hey, I got these from the textbook publisher, and I tried to pick questions I thought my students could reasonably answer) that involved filling in the capital of Bohemia, home of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. But I was thinking that we did cover art from Bohemia, and that Prague is a famous city.
Well, I did give half credit to the person who put Karlštejn, because we examined the chapel and paintings there and it's just south of Prague. But nearly the whole class gave answers that included Constantinople, Dijon, "Broche" (I think this was a misspelling of Bruges), Cannes, Florence, Tuscany, Paris, "Crucia" (?), Avignon, and finally the Czech Republic.
This kind of thing makes me think I need to give map quizzes like we used to have in my 7th-grade geography class. The problem with that idea is that if they don't know where modern cities and countries are, it doesn't seem wise to confuse the issue too much with placement of the likes of Burgundy (capital: Dijon) and the Holy Roman Empire. I mean, I'll be content if they have a reasonable notion of these things and stop saying Paris and Constantinople were the capital of Bohemia.
It kind of reminds me of Neville Chamberlain's infamous 1938 remark about Czechoslovakia being a faraway land about which we know little.
On the plus side, most of my students seem clear on flying buttresses, rose windows, the purpose of the Palazzo Vecchia, and the fact that lead is used to hold stained glass windows together. This makes me happy.

Off to a Good Start

2010-01-20T11:01:00.003-05:00

Since a significant number of my students are art majors rather than art history, I'm trying to give some assignments that aren't purely writing-oriented. This quarter I'm trying one that looks very promising--the survey students (learning about Gothic to 1850) are designing cathedrals and a mosque. (We aren't covering Islamic art this quarter, but we did last quarter, and I didn't want the assignment to force them into a specific religious outlook.)
How does it work? Well, without going into too much detail, they're in groups of 3-5 (mostly 4) and have a combination of group and individual things to turn in. Each group was instructed to choose a style and period, a geographic location, and various other details. The groups have just turned in their preliminary proposals, which are subject to change and development, and these are pretty exciting. The majority are Gothic, since that's what we've covered in class thus far, but other periods have also been chosen--one Renaissance, three Baroque, and a Mughal mosque.

French Gothic "The outer layer will be in stone + many rose windows with stained glass to accompany it. The structure will be airy + will have a high Gothic vaulting system..."

French Gothic "Stone cathedral. Started 1185. Finished 1230. 130 ft tall. Not a pilgrimage church. At least 2 rose windows. Holds approx. 3,000-4,000."

"13th century Paris. We're going to focus on the Virgin Mary for all our interior design. Our church will feature many rose windows + an ornate alterpiece."

Italian Gothic "It isn't a pilgrimage church. The patron saint is undecided still. Saint Clare or Saint Francis are our options."

Late Gothic in Monaco "The church... has both French and Italian influences throughout its exterior and interior design due to its geographic location... There will be usage of flying buttresses and other common gothic elements..."

"13th-14th century Italian Gothic. This cathedral takes its inspirations from the Siena's Duomo. Since the Duomo was the highlight of construction around this time and was looking close to impossible to finish, some of Nicola Pisano's favorite workers moved on to smaller projects... In the design marble would be throughout. The cathedral would feel more open when walking through its structure. The façade would mimick some ideas of other cathedrals in the area. Silver and mosaics would be abundant."

Renaissance (this may need to change due to England and Ireland's particular versions for the Renaissance) "It will be in honor of St. Patrick who converted the Celts to Catholicism... This cathedral will house some relics from Saints and pieces of the original cross as well."

"The location of our cathedral is the city of Genoa, Italy. It is dedicated to St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510)... It will be primarily in the baroque style, but as Genoa is a significant port city it may draw elements from other styles..."

A German baroque cathedral is also in the works.

Mosque in India "The main structure constructed entirely of marble sits upon a high plinth that can be reached from walk ways from the North, South, and West each leading to the three iwan, arch-shaped doorways... Four minarets frame the outer walls, one at each corner of the plinth... There is a fountain in the center of garden courtyard with paths leading to the Main dome area which begins just past the North-South axis..."

Publishing Industry Still Mostly Going to Hell

2010-01-06T10:01:00.005-05:00

I've mostly been prepping courses over the last few weeks, although I wouldn't say that that was always where my mind was. But I don't think anyone really wants to hear more about course prep right now. (I'm not wrong about that, am I?) So instead I'd like to post portions of an interesting blog post on the publishing industry, which may not surprise or shock some of the writers of my acquaintance, but might disturb the rest of you.
Martin Shepard of Permanent Press, who blogs about books and publishing at The Cockeyed Pessimist, opens with some background from André Schiffrin’s The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, which was published in 2000--ten years ago, which is to say that the events and trends Schiffrin described ought to be old news but unfortunately are not. As Shepard summarizes,

publishing changed, from the mid fifties when a plethora of small but prestigious houses that valued ideas and content as much as profit were transformed into five behemoths that by 2000 wound up sharing 80% of the market. The early acquisitions started innocently enough when the founders aged, fell ill, or died, as when Bennett Cerf at Random House acquired Alfred A. Knopf in 1960 because of Knopf’s deteriorating health. With that merger, Random House did not even control 1% of the market. Nor was it very different when, a year later, Cerf acquired Pantheon, after Andre’s father—a co-founder of Pantheon—passed away and the other partners fell into disagreements. By then André was asked to join this growing conglomerate and, for the next 30 years, as a corporate insider, witnessed the changes.

In other words, the publishing world that people my age and older grew up with began to change in the 1960s, but few observers would have noticed that this was a trend until the 1970s or even the early 1980s.

More amalgamations followed which were then swallowed by even larger media corporations. Random House, taken over by RCA in 1965, was later sold to Si Newhouse, who demanded an increase in sales and circulation by appealing to a wider, more common audience. Newhouse arranged for Random House to pay Nancy Reagan a three million dollar advance for her memoir.

Why anyone in their right mind would want to read a ghost-written memoir by Nancy Reagan is beyond me, but this sort of celebrity book became more and more common, losing publishers millions of dollars since many of these books never earned enough to pay for their huge advances. Many authors, meanwhile, were getting advances in the low thousands (not millions) if they got advances at all. But people like Newhouse figured that the answer was to get even more celebrity titles, while (contradictorily) insisting that every book published should earn back its advance. (Here I could discourse on some of the ways bookstore chains and the Thor Power Tools court decision about warehousing inventory ensured that books would have trouble earning back advances, but that's another, though related, story.)
Random House was not, of course, the only house in pursuit of celebrities.

By 2000 Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, having purchased HarperCollins in 1987, went the same route. Commercial books were linked to Murdoch’s entertainment holdings and his conservative political beliefs. Harpers changed when the new non fiction lists, written by the likes of Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, and other figures who shared Murdoch’s conservative political beliefs, made their appearance.

Simon & Schuster, meanwhile, grew increasingly entertainment-industry driven when it was acquired by Viacom, owned by Paramount pictures. As Shepard observes,

By then the publishing world had largely rid itself of literary people from its golden age and replaced them with business men. Mass culture replaced literature and profit was paramount. Now every title was expected to make a significant contribution to both corporate overhead, profit, and growth leading everyone to seek the same “successful titles.”

Schiffrin said that by 2000, these corporate publishers had pretty much decided that if they couldn’t see themselves selling a base of 20,000 copies, it did not pay for them to take on a book. As he pointed out, when Pantheon introduced Franz Kafka to American audiences, it had a first printing of only 800 copies. As for Bertolt Brecht’s first work, only 600 copies were sold. In today’s market place, neither of these renowned writers would ever have seen the light of day in America.

Let's keep in mind that last time I was keeping close track of the industry, which was some years ago, first print runs for many books were in the 2000-5000 copy range. 600-800 was not usually regarded as cost-effective; 20,000 was pretty close to best-seller status.
Shepard notes that by 2009, publishers were not just acquiring celebrity books but had begun to devote entire imprints to popular culture, and quotes a HarperCollins press release:

HarperCollinsPublishers, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world, today announced the launch of It Books, a new popular culture imprint dedicated to entertainment, music, fashion, design, and sports. [...] "It Books will be a new way for us to reach readers like us--people with an endless appetite for pop culture, who live for music and film and art and fashion and the Internet," said Carrie Kania. "An It book should be fun. It should be interesting. It should be cool. It should look great."

Now, I'm not personally opposed to coverage of popular culture. I think it has its place, and moreover that interesting and intelligent things can be said about it. But I don't think it ought to take over the publishing world. Furthermore, I find the title of the HarperCollins imprint pretty funny. "So-and-So is an It," we used to say scathingly when I was in sixth grade. This was not so much intended as a gender comment as a suggestion that the person wasn't even animate. It's true that back in the 1920s, "It" referred to sex appeal, and Clara Bow was the "It" Girl, but I doubt many people will make that connection.
Well, Janet Maslin's first review of an It Book has prompted Martin Shepard to create The Donkey Awards, to be given critics for the “Best Abuse of Space for the Least Deserving Book,” and the call is out for nominations (Maslin's review is the first nominee).
Novels of any sort are reviewed less and less often (we knew that, didn't we?), and especially literary novels, and most especially those from small presses that don't have the money to advertise in The New York Times. Shepard points out that you can spend $45,000 for a full-page color ad there--assuming, of course, that you have that kind of money to throw around, which most publishers focusing on literature (rather than pop culture and journalistic nonfiction) don't.
I like Shepard's comparison of the book reviews in The New York Times with the same paper's restaurant reviews. He says that while Culture Desk editor Jon Landman asserts they seek a balance between "popular" and more serious books,

so far this has not been in evidence. In their restaurant reviews, the Times covers the good ones—large as well as small. When it comes to cooking as an art form, their reviewers appreciate good taste. If they decided it was more important to cover the most popular eateries in this country, good taste would go out the window and they would be writing about Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, Jack in the Box and IHOP.

You can read Shepard's full post at The Donkey Awards.

Bunny Nativity

2009-12-23T08:29:00.000-05:00

It was brought to my attention awhile back that there is apparently a subcultural art genre best described as "bunny nativity scenes/figures."

Looming lop-eared nativity figures
Simplicity pattern of lop-eared group

While we're at it, see this fine essay on the Easter Bunny's Nativity.

I don't think I have the nerve to tell Ms. Spots and Orion about this.

Just Lazing About

2009-12-22T21:02:00.000-05:00

I admit it, I have been remiss. There has been no blog post in nearly a month! Shocking!
Well, you know, when the fall quarter ended, your faithful correspondent was a bit weary. Went and imbibed Slavic culture at AAASS. Attended a wedding in the alien land of Florida. Took garage kittens to the shelter. Took Ms. Spottolina to the vet and returned with four kinds of medicine. Played Scrabble with colleagues. All that sort of thing.
More news might be forthcoming over the Christmas season. It can't be guaranteed, but it might happen. Some of us have a lot of course prep to do and are putting some of it off while ...um... writing a few things.

Carver and Lish

2009-11-24T07:17:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time, in world far far away, I began submitting my fiction to literary magazines. I'd read stacks of books on becoming a writer, although most of them seemed rather unhelpful as regards writing the kind of fiction I had in mind.
Gradually, although I did succeed in publishing more fiction than most people I knew (in part because I was very diligent about both writing and going to the post office), I began to realize that something called "dirty realism" was what American editors really wanted. Never mind that they might say they were open to all kinds of fiction so long as it was good, "dirty realism" was what they really thirsted for. I learned that a guy named Raymond Carver was the king of dirty realism, that his acolytes were many, and that by god, if you wanted to write some other kind of short literary fiction, you had better pretend you were from a foreign country, or at least set your tale in one. Friends suggested that I adopt a Spanish pseudonym, but I resisted.
Another name I saw mentioned time and time again was that of Gordon Lish. Lish, who was Carver's editor, was quite the arbiter of taste in those days--the heir to Maxwell Perkins, it seemed, except that he never sounded anywhere near as nice as Perkins. I always had the feeling that Perkins was the kind of guy you'd like to have work with you, especially, if like Thomas Wolfe, you had trouble editing yourself down to a readable length. Lish, on the other hand, gave a more severe impression. I never had even the slightest fantasy of working with Lish (perhaps because I found most dirty realism singularly dull reading), although clearly many writers found him helpful.
Of late, articles have been coming out detailing Lish's editing of Carver. Apparently Lish chopped quite a bit out of Carver's work, not just in a fat-cutting operation, but completely changing tone, characterizations, and endings. James Campbell discusses the editing in The Times Literary Supplement, and none other than horror writer Stephen King provides an account of it in his review of Carol Sklenicka's recent biography of Carver for the New York Times.
I confess I find the whole thing rather shocking. A good editor can improve a piece of writing, or at least some pieces of writing, but changing the entire thrust of the piece? Reading Campbell's and King's articles, I began to wonder whether perhaps I would have liked Carver's writing had Lish not (as King suggests) taken the heart out.

A little addendum (I just ran across this):
“...neo-realistic minimalism--a dull mode starring writers like Anne Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver. Because of its barren anti-adjectival, anti-adverbial unwittiness, this style also fails to win audiences--but it is easy to teach in creative writing classes to a clientele with little literary background or allusive competence. At the moment, while Latin America[n] literature continues to march forward, American fiction is becalmed.” Elizabeth Dipple, The Unresolvable Plot: Reading Contemporary Fiction (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1988), 11.
How I would have loved to have seen that assessment back in 1988!

And Still Too Busy to Blog...

2009-11-23T14:47:00.000-05:00

From a take-home final exam:

"Popular entertainment of this period were drinking and prostitution according to Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere."

"...it is unbalanced in a very traditional manner instead of all the figures and buildings being sporadic."

"The painting depicts free love in a classless and harmonious society. [...] I also admire Renoir for fanaticizing the typical scene at the Galette."

Re Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party: "Maybe this is a luncheon after a funeral..."

The Bellelli Family by Degas: "Though the girl sitting on the chair looks like she only has one leg. Which could make her mother not pay attention to her."

"As for Cassatt’s little girl, she is placed in a dress showing her lacy undergarments, which is a great capturing of what little girls do. Or, the exposure could be a foreshadowing of what path this girl may meet later on in her endeavors."

"...the cobblestone street that continues back into the depths of the painting with the larger masculine buildings in the background as well."

Re Caillebotte's Pont de l'Europe: "Is the woman approaching the man as some sort of constituent? [...] While one asks themselves these questions they can most certainly wonder weather the dog is feral or the middle right man is the object of the previous man's gaze?"

"While the focus is arguable, I find the railroad often my priority."

"The girl at least is still fixated on the railroad..."

"Manet’s piece contains a loom of steam created by a train’s engine."

"Caillebotte is also sure to include the railroad system which was popular during this time..."

"The statement seems to be that whatever your class or gender, you were controlled by the railroad system."

"...whether your fighting a war, or sticking rocks in your shoe, I suppose you won't know if your great 'till a historian tells you!"

And when you're writing complete crap on your exam, I suppose you won't know till you get your grade. Question for self: should I not have discussed railroads as a sign of 19th-century modernity?

More Distractions from Blogging

2009-11-22T17:15:00.003-05:00

The survey exams were for the most part encouraging, but revealed some evidence of confusion. There were also some surprising observations.

On the Etruscan She-Wolf: "Though the mother is presented as a dog and the children are human, it still is betrayed as nursing the young."

The Parthenon "was one of the first and only structures to be completed before the Peloponesian War." (One hopes the student meant "after the Persian wars, atop the Acropolis," not ever in human history.)

The Hagia Sophia "is based on a Gothic style church." (As a prophecy, perhaps?)

From a student who has no facts at her command about any image seen: "The Roman building on the left [the Parthenon] is meant to be more decorative than useful since there are no walls... This buidling may have been used for meetings or gatherings when it was still used. [The Hagia Sophia] definitely has church qualities on the inside because of the apse in the center..."

"This was the orignal partheon. Found in athen's the romans highly regarded this building. It was built during the Peosipanian War. Queen Athena was found inside the partheon. She was later removed by we only have pictures of what we think she looked like, and remodeled statues."

The Pompeiian "Portrait of Menander" and an early Medieval St. Matthew "are of males dressed in togas with olive tree head dresses... One man is bearing part of his chest while the other is cloted but has the front of his toga open so women can see his chest while he relaxes and reads a book."

St. Matthew (painted 816-835) "looks as if Picasso had a hand in this."

Menander, on the other hand, "is mellow, as if he is lounging on the beach soaking up the rays."

"The painting is three dimensional." (I suppose this is meant as a tribute to the skill of medieval Islamic book illustrators...)

Complete misidentification of the Bayeux Tapestry: the Tapestry "is pretty self explanitory by the title, A poor man is being refused to enter a mosque ... Both pieces [Bayeux Tapestry & Arch of Titus] tell us a story it is trying to figure out what that story is, is the hard part." (Not if you read the textbook and came to class...)

"The top is sculpted, and the bottom is a tapastry. Both images are battle scenes." (And this is a complete essay?)

The Bayeux Tapestry "depicts the story of Moses..."

"The 'tapestry' tells the story of how the Norman ruler swims across the channel to claim the thrown of King Edward the Confessor."

"This is not quite a textile because it was knitted."

The Primaporta Augustus "could have been created by the Gods or they just loved him."

Re the Primaporta Augustus: "With cupid on his heels it makes me thing that he did not have a love, until cupid stepped in. Maybe Cupid is sending/helping him find his love."

Well, now I know what to do for Valentine's Day. I'll send cards of the Primaporta Augustus. Be Mine!

Why I Have No Time to Blog

2009-11-20T18:24:00.003-05:00

From a recent paper assignment:

"Big patches of color are lying on their canvases like a blanket of stars on the night sky and like most art movements, comes heavy criticism. "

"It is rather more importantly the distinction from anything else, rather than conglomerating to a particular niche with the same status or mindset."

Degas "loved to paint moving bodies that were sent into peculiar angels."

"When attempting to paint an image of the modern time, artist have trouble with people staying still and remaining still."

"Dandyism is a state of idleness with an indispensable amount of money in terms of finding a sense of individuality and contentment."

Rulers "had to be perfected in a beautiful manner or the artist would have suffered severe consequences. The artist may have been jailed or even put to death because of his inability to incorporate the impressionist style into their painting. "

"Behind her is the second woman who is holding a bushel of flowers, lying on her side with her head probed up by her hand." (Courbet's Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine)

"Art historians look back into the future and try to capture their responses to paintings, sculptures, or even photos." (Back into the future?)

Baudelaire "proved he was well informed and a prurient art critic earning respect from the art community."

"Baudelaire does not digress that painters from the past should be all together ignored..."

"I gain the sense that [T.J.] Clark is the type of guy that tells you that the young teenagers kissing are going to die first in the horror flick."

And we slog on.

More Linguistic Explorations

2009-11-08T21:48:00.001-05:00

In my last post I mentioned Geoffrey K. Pullum's witty and instructive analyses of certain aspects of Dan Brown's literary style. Today I am pleased to present a guest post by a reader who, while much entertained by Pullum's criticisms in general, was (like me) a bit surprised by one of them. We follow up on the Slumbering Moa's earlier anonymous comment with a more thorough investigation of the phrase in question.

The Slumbering Moa writes:

Let us stipulate, as the lawyers say, that Dan Brown is not a great prose stylist. Nevertheless, I think one of Pullum’s criticisms of him is unfair. Specifically, Pullum faults Brown for writing that “a handful of scientists moved briskly about,” since “‘moving briskly about’ is a cliché.” For Pullum, Brown’s use of the phrase discordantly evokes a humorous passage from Stephen Potter concerning a fictional character who enjoys one-upmanship: “To a definitely older man, of his still older wife he would comment that he was glad she ‘was still moving very briskly about.’" Pullum goes on to explain:

The remark was of course intended to be deeply unsettling if not shattering: to say of someone that they are "moving very briskly about" implies that they are extraordinarily old and infirm, and it is a wonder they can even take a step without their walker. It simply isn't something you would normally say about ordinary people who have a spring in their step, or about scientists walking from one office to another in the foyer of a research center. It's a wonderful example of Dan Brown's knack for coming up with exactly the phrase not to use.

Pullum’s criticism has two basic premises. First, the phrase “moved briskly about” is a cliché. Second, it implies extraordinary age and infirmity, making it bizarrely inappropriate to apply to working scientists.

In my earlier comment, I noted that Pullum ignores the word “still.” This word is key to the humorous effect Potter achieves, and Brown does not use it. Pullum also ignores the word “very,” which Potter employs to intensify this effect. Again, Brown does not use it.

But is Brown’s phrase a cliché? A little googling does not produce overwhelming evidence for Pullum's claim. First, let’s look at some raw numbers. I did four searches: "moved briskly about" (Brown's exact words), with 121,000 results; "move briskly about," with 4,500; "moves briskly about" with 699; and "moving briskly about," with 18,600. Given the millions of search results one often gets from Google, these numbers do not seem particularly impressive for a supposed cliché. Furthermore, when you eliminate those results from the search for "moved briskly about" that include the word "preacher," thus removing one particular joke that appears online repeatedly, it brings the number down from 121,000 to 47,600. By contrast, the phrase “proof of the pudding” produced 253,000 results, while its ubiquitous corruption “proof is in the pudding” produced 554,000.

A search for “moved briskly about” and “cliché” together produces only one result which identifies the former as an example of the latter, namely Pullum’s own post on Language Log. All the others simply had the two things appearing somewhere on the same page together. Again, by contrast, a search for “proof is in the pudding” and “cliché” together produces result after result noting this phrase’s undisputed status as a cliché.

Moving beyond the numbers, what do the search results themselves reveal about usage?

The top result from the search for "moved briskly about" was Pullum's article on Language Log, quoting Dan Brown. Twenty of the top thirty results were for the joke I mentioned above, which includes the sentence, "The preacher was wired for sound with a lapel mike, and as he preached, he moved briskly about the platform." The others included: "Desktop Calendar 2.3.7 moved briskly about," from a page that won't come up when I click on it; "the 58-year old moved briskly about the stage" from a review of a performance by Robin Williams (one of only two top results from all four searches that I thought supported Pullum's claims, however weakly); "the new officers of the 4th Battalion of New Jersey Volunteers, moved briskly about on their new errands," from a book on the Revolutionary War; "Uniformed and plain-clothed personnel moved briskly about their tasks," from an online excerpt of what appeared to be a romance novel; "The nurses who moved briskly about smiled at the young man in an ordinary suit who had come among them," from a book on psychology; "She moved briskly about the yard, taking things from the line," from "When the Bayou Overflows" (1895) by Alice Dunbar; and "Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly about the hearth to and fro," from Ulysses by James Joyce. There were also two irrelevant results, in which "about" did not form a phrase with "moved briskly" but rather with the words following it (e.g., “the handpiece is moved briskly about ½ inch above the skin”).

I did not get more convincing support for Pullum's assertions when I changed the tense to "move," the top ten results being: "Nurses move briskly about the room, checking the conditions of the various patients," from a site on "Care after Surgery"; "It is difficult to move briskly about the kitchen weighted down by sixty pounds of baby," from "Cooking Madness" by Carol Castellano; "She could move briskly about, while he seems fixed to the spot," from a teaching guide to Macbeth; "To move briskly about. Used chiefly in calling country dances," from Dictionary of American Regional English; "males were seen to move briskly about with the tail turned sharply at an angle of about 90 degrees from the body," from a scholarly article on the courtship habits of salamanders; "Staff officers and couriers began to move briskly about," from an account of a Civil War battle; "it is well that they move briskly about their tasks," from two different pages on microbial parasites; "Their inhabitants move briskly about in Fords," from a Time magazine article from 1928 on the cities of Egypt; and one irrelevancy (“They do, however, move briskly – about two steps per second.”)

"Moves briskly about" yielded: "the sun moves briskly about the center of our galaxy," from a book on Einstein's theory of relativity; "The player's young king moves briskly about his town," from a review of a video game; two more versions of the preacher joke; "Hoffa moves briskly about the suite as he finishes putting on his clothes," from Life magazine (1959); "She moves briskly about her laboratories," from Time magazine (1933); "Mr. Buono, who has been called J.B. for as long as he can remember, moves briskly about campus with a friendly greeting to all," from a New York Times story about a 95-year-old (the second arguably supporting citation for Pullum); "He doesn't have an actual office but moves briskly about the plant, trouble-shooting or trying out some new production theory," from an article in the Indiana Star; and "Invisibly he moves briskly about the room as if he owned the place," from a poem posted to the site Neopoet. Once again, there was also an irrelevant result (“moves briskly about a fish trap”).

What about "moving briskly about"? The first result is again Pullum himself, followed by: "An American in Paris, Moving Briskly About Town," the title of a New York Times review of Stanley Karnow's Paris in the 50s; "Maude was moving briskly about the room, putting it into the beautiful order that Mother insisted on," from "A Fortunate Mistake" (1904) by Lucy Maud Montgomery; "One need not have visions of unattached neurons moving briskly about the brain," from a blog post; "Through her bright windows we could see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room," from "The Woman Who Tried to be Good" (1913) by Edna Ferber; "In all these prairie villages, the Burrowing Owl is seen moving briskly about," from the Audubon Society's website; "The group is to start moving briskly about the room," from a "community-building exercise"; yet another version of the preacher joke; "Grace was constantly surrounded by people moving briskly about," from "The Secret to Happier Meal Times"; and "It seemed as if hardly any time had passed when she heard the household moving briskly about, and breakfast preparing downstairs," from The Woodlanders (1887) by Thomas Hardy.

These seem to me to represent fairly diverse uses that are not at all suggestive of cliché. Admittedly, when you read them all together like this, the cumulative effect is to make the phrase seem tired, but I think that's inherent in the exercise. But cliché or not, the phrase, judging by these examples, hardly bears the unavoidable connotations of age and infirmity that Pullum suggests.

Ultimately, Brown’s crime in this instance seems to be that he used an innocuous expression that happened to remind Pullum of a favorite passage from a writer he much prefers.

In closing, I might add that in one of my students' papers we get the Brown-like (or perhaps merely journalistic) construction "Portrayed through sculpture is the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, along with her son Eros, also known as Cupid."

Style and Popular Fiction

2009-10-29T21:04:00.001-04:00

I've been amusing myself recently with items from the linguistics blog Language Log (latest posts here). One of the topics it has covered in years past is the writing style of Dan Brown, who for those who don't know is the author of The Da Vinci Code and other apparently quite similar thrillers. I don't follow present-day popular culture any more closely than I can help (just as I try not to tailgate on the freeway--it could be hazardous to my health), but as an art historian, I couldn't help hearing about Brown's book, if only because art historians fight an endless battle with students who think that Leonardo da Vinci should be called "Da Vinci." (Being a specialist in modernism, I've stepped back a bit from this fight because I have the opposite problem, that of training my students to stop calling more recent artists by their first names. And not just artists. I just graded a paper that repeatedly, although not consistently, referred to the philosopher Edmund Burke as "Edmund.")
Well--not to digress too far onto the vagaries of students--these pieces, written by Geoffrey K. Pullum, are highly entertaining even for those of us who haven't bothered to read anything by Brown. I am not linking to every last one of the posts, as there are many and some of them are a bit tangential to Brown's stylistic quirks, but this is a good sampling:
The Dan Brown Code
The Sixteen First Rules of Fiction
Dan Brown Still Moving Very Briskly About
Renowned Author Dan Brown Staggered Through His Formulaic Opening Sentence
Learning the Ropes in the Trenches with Dan Brown
Now, while I thought Pullum's observations were quite funny (not to mention that they have taught me a few things I didn't know about what Mark Twain might have called The Awful English Language had he been writing from a German perspective), it did rapidly strike me that prior to his encounters with Brown, Pullum had evidently escaped acquaintance with the language of American popular fiction.
I don't read all that much popular fiction myself, and very little of what I do read falls into the blockbuster category, but I've read enough of that sort of thing that the quotations from Brown's books didn't sound odd to me. My reaction was not so much "My god, the man has execrable style" (after all, I read much worse style every time I grade papers) but "Hmm, sounds like typical bestseller schlock style." I was a bit surprised, in fact, that Pullum was so appalled at Brown's journalism-inspired habit of saying things like "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered..." It's not a construction I would normally use in my fiction, but then I don't write Brown's kind of fiction.
This might not have struck me so forcefully had I not recently been pawing through a stack of books on writing. A few of them have been on academic writing, but some of them have been on fiction writing, because I am well aware that plotting is hard for me and I thought I might investigate what other writers have said about it.
This bit of investigation quickly reminded me why it has been so many years since I've read books on writing fiction: books on writing fiction are almost invariably designed to teach the reader how to write somewhat like Dan Brown. Whether it be a question of style or plotting, the general sort of thing Brown does is held up as an example of how to write.
I can see why. Brown may have crummy style, but it's vigorous crummy style. When books on fiction writing give examples of good and bad writing, the bad writing is always remarkably inert. Writers like Brown (and to be fair I don't think I've seen a writing text use him as an example, but other thriller writers are quoted liberally) carry the reader along with their energetic words. It may be the energy of an uncoordinated guy playing Whack-a-mole, but that kind of thing clearly appeals to a lot of people.
Since I'm not one of those people, I look at such writing guides and sigh. There may be useful tips in there even for writers of literary fiction, but it's hard to pick them out when the authors are exhorting us to write cliffhangers.
The analyses of Brown's flawed phrasing brought a couple of additional thoughts to mind. We learn to write from the writing we read, and so if popular fiction is full of mangled metaphors and poorly thought out phrasing, how can I expect my students to do better? After all, we're all seeing so many plurals written with apostrophes that it's hard to avoid writing those even when we've always known better. I've had to reality check myself on things I know are correct (I first found Language Log when I felt compelled to verify that "simplistic," a word I am constantly telling students to look up, does not mean "simple").
But also, after looking through all the things that Brown does wrong, I began to get very nervous. There's a general notion that I write pretty well, but the thought of having Geoffrey K. Pullum copyedit me makes me unusually anxious.

Photos-o-Kittens

2009-10-25T16:16:00.003-04:00

There have been requests for photographic documentation of the kittens who appeared in the garage. Yes, they were a product of spontaneous generation. As Shakespeare (that is to say Hamlet) says, "For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog," the obvious corollary is "a dark garage full of defunct refrigerators breeds black kittens."
Try it yourself, I'm sure you'll find that kittens result. On the other hand, it would be better if you adopted these two. They're awfully nice. And one of them will prune your geraniums for you.

And Kittens...

2009-10-23T19:51:00.003-04:00

Yesterday morning as I stumbled into the garage to drive to school, something small and dark dashed from under my car over toward the pile of miscellaneous debris left by I'm not sure what earlier inhabitants. Despite my nearly sleepwalking state, I was hard-pressed not to let out a yell. Were there... rats in the garage now?
Fortunately I had gotten a brief look at the creature's tail, which seemed much too furry for a rat. I decided it must have been a squirrel, since the neighborhood abounds with them. Or a chipmunk, perhaps; if it was a squirrel, it had a pretty poor excuse for a tail.
When I returned, I saw three squirrels with extremely bushy tails playing outside the garage, and I thought well, it certainly can't have been one of those squirrels. I opened the garage door, got out of the car, and caught sight of a small face that could only belong to a kitten.
This was better than seeing rats, but not at all what I wanted to find in my garage. The animal was very skittish, so I went in the house and, being utterly exhausted, forgot about it.
This afternoon, however, I remembered that there was a kitten in the garage, so I thought I had better reconnoiter. Apart from the fact that it was a rainy day, the kitten might want to get out of the garage and go home.
Er... I now perceived that there were at least two kittens in the garage. This could be bad. There might be a whole litter, although how my neighbor, my landlord, and I could have failed to notice a litter of cats growing up in the garage over a period of weeks, I couldn't imagine. I decided I had better bring them some milk. My neighbor didn't seem to be home, so I put a note in her mailbox about our new tenants. She has cats, so I supposed it was vaguely possible that the kittens belonged to her, but this seemed improbable.
When I went out to check the mail later in the afternoon, I found her checking hers as well. Her reaction to the news of the kittens was not a happy one. She had just, she informed me, taken in a mother cat and four kittens to help out a friend, and was having no luck finding homes for these animals. The last thing she needed was more kittens in her life. We agreed that the young squatters must have wandered in recently when our landlord was working on the garage. We did not think it made sense to tell him about these new inhabitants, as he reacts badly to stressful news and would probably tell us that it was our fault that kittens had moved into the garage. Instead, we went out to examine the beasts. They are small and black, one with sleek fur and the other with fuzzier fur. One of them also has a white spot on its chest. As is the nature of kittens, they are quite enchanting, and while they were initially very shy, the scent of cat on Leanne prompted them to feel more comfortable about both of us, and we were able to pet them a bit. This did not, of course, help us figure out what to do with them. Leanne said that the local shelters had already told her they weren't taking any more cats. We gave the kittens more milk and some cat chow, and Leanne took me in to meet her new guests, who are quartered in a sector of her living room, separated from the permanent cats. Leanne's kittens and their mother are white with tortoise-shell-like spots, and of course are also very appealing animals. The garage kittens look very slightly older, but I don't suppose by more than a week.
We haven't decided what to do about our guests, but of course we can't let them starve.

Life with German Wasps

2009-10-22T20:46:00.005-04:00

I've been complaining of the yellowjackets that keep appearing in my dining room. I'm not sure where they get in, but once in, they fly around, burn themselves on the overhead light, crawl around on the floor, and eventually die. From time to time they venture into the living room, especially if I have a lamp on there. Now and then they buzz angrily past my head, which makes me nervous. And I've seen Orion gazing at them with deep fascination, almost like a cat ready to pounce.
Last weekend was the jackpot, entomologically speaking. In the space of two days, no less than ten of them found their way onto my dining room floor. While most of them were dead by the time I counted, a certain number were crawling about. I was mildly concerned about being stung, but more worried that Orion would incite one to sting his nose.
Of course, I was the one who got stung. I was minding my own business, which is the best thing to do around bees and wasps, but one of the yellowjackets apparently crawled onto my sock and got entangled in the surface (it was a sort of terrycloth-like fabric). The first I knew of this was the onset of a nasty sensation in my heel. I looked down and observed the creature--probably still stinging me.
Well, I've been stung by bees before, with effects from minor to fairly extreme (not, however, including anaphylactic shock), but yellowjacket stings were new to me. I knew that while bees die after stinging, wasps are able to sting again, so my main thought was to get the sock and yellowjacket separated from my skin.
That wasn't all that easy given that I was in pain and the sock was way down there on my foot. Sometimes one's foot seems remarkably far away from the rest of the body--mysteriously inaccessible--and I say that despite not being more than perhaps five or ten pounds over my ideal weight. But eventually I got the sock off and limped upstairs to the tub, where I washed the sting, applied a Czech insect-bite-and-sting remedy (all I had handy) and a bandaid, and hunted for the Benadryl.
As such things go, the sting wasn't appalling. It kept me awake for awhile that night, but not in agony. This was, I will say, the first time that Benadryl didn't knock me out completely--but then I've only taken it twice before, and not for stings.
The area around the sting, however, has continued to be rather itchy, and this finally led me to do a bit of internet research. Apparently quite a few people find that yellowjacket stings itch for long after the initial pain subsides. People even describe the sensation as making them want to rip their skin off. I'm glad to say that I am not in that position. I am, however, contemplating getting one or more of the remedies suggested by the various sufferers, which include household ammonia, baking soda (normally I do have this on hand), meat tenderizer, and hemorrhoid creams.
I also looked up yellowjackets with the notion of learning more about them. It turns out there are several species of similar wasp all going by this name. Postmortem examination of one of the corpses tells me that what we have here are German wasps, a fairly aggressive species that has mostly taken over from the native Eastern variety. Both types are beneficial insects so long as they don't come into direct contact with humans. They eat insect pests, but unfortunately they also like things like picnic food and garbage. Their fondness (and I might say especially the German wasps' fondness) for junk food and sugary things leads them to conflict with humans.
I don't actually keep either meat or many sugary foods on hand, but if the wasps are nesting in the wall of the house, apparently all I can do is wait until the frost kills them. Only queens, apparently, overwinter and nests are only used for one year in this climate.

Revising the Dissertation

2009-10-17T09:28:00.003-04:00

Publishers want my dissertation. They've told me so. But of course that doesn't mean they want it as is; the more well-regarded of them want it fixed up. There haven't been any specifics on this, but I know they want the footnotes trimmed, the literature review (which I didn't want to write anyway) trimmed or excised, the title improved, and all that sort of thing. And the book proposal has to be finished up and then (like a basic grant proposal) recreated in several different formats to suit the various publishers to whom I will submit it.
Exactly when I'm going to do all this when teaching full time and preparing new classes, I don't know, but pretty much everyone with a new PhD and a job has that problem.
I'm not sure my dissertation needs huge amounts of revision, but whatever it does need is bound to seem huge to me. With all that in mind, I took a look at William Germano's From Dissertation to Book.
As with any how-to or self-help book, the question facing me as a reader was "What brilliantly useful bit(s) can I glean from this? Will there be anything that just rockets me forward?" It really only takes one of those tidbits for a book of this kind to be worthwhile. But unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case may be, I'm already rather familiar with writing and publishing. It's not easy to give me the pleasant surprise of "that's just what I needed to know." All through the first half of the book, I kept muttering "Get to the revision." That first half was full of information and counseling that I'm sure a great many people need, but which for me were bloody obvious. Germano doesn't get going on actual pointers for revision until halfway through, but that wasn't really clear until I got there. After all, you never know where some informational gem might be hidden. I might not know as much as I think I do.
Germano has useful tips on coming up with a new title (something I had already done, at least provisionally); on subheading the chapters (sections with subheads had been a big help from a book on writing the dissertation itself, but my subhead titles will benefit from the Germano touch, as will the chapter titles themselves); and while people generally think I write well, I was decidedly charmed by Germano's advice not too quote too liberally from authors whose prose style is far better than one's own. "Strong writers, like strong perfume," says Germano after throwing a fine chunk of M. F. K. Fisher our way, "should be used with great care. Comparison with your own prose will be inevitable." Indeed. I like to think I have a pretty good prose style, but its best examples are not to be found in everything I write. You are not finding my best style in this blog post, nor will you find it in most of my dissertation, despite the compliments I have had on the latter.
The overuse of the passive voice is not, I think, one of my major sins, but I very much like it when Germano says "Some passives we're glad we haven't had to see:

In the beginning the heavens and the earth were created by God.
Arms and the man are being sung by me.
Ishmael is what I'm called."

Yep.

Toyen (the band)

2009-10-14T11:12:00.004-04:00

I've known for quite some time that there was a Czech band named after Toyen, but it was no longer recording while I was living in Prague, so I never ran across any of the group's albums.
The band has a MySpace page, however, so I've finally had a chance to find out what they sound like. While I'd hardly say they are the musical equivalent of Toyen's art, they're quite listenable.
According to the MySpace page, they began in fall 1988 in Prague, but were officially founded in March 1989. Audiences and critics were apparently looking forward to their debut, because most of the band had been in "the legendary band Letadlo" [Airplane], which was suppressed by the Communist regime in the early 1980s. According to the MySpace page,

"The band TOYEN were in the right time on the right place. The guys had good infos from the world, good timing –after „Velvet revolution“ and the main-good songs,image and they have own material with Czech lyrics, but they could sing the songs in English and it was very important for their future."

In fact, the band toured in the US, including a concert at CBGB's, and also in the UK and Austria. At one point they apparently were opening for Depeche Mode. However, before long Toyen experienced some changes in personnel and did not last long despite its success at home and abroad.
I like the idea of a band named after a surrealist, but I think I'd have preferred the group to have borne a closer resemblance to the artist. Then again, I don't think we can exactly say the Manchester band Durutti Column is all that similar to the anarchist anti-Franco contingent that fought in the Spanish Civil War under Buenaventura Durruti, either.

Napping Rabbits

2009-10-12T21:27:00.000-04:00

"So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay" (Milton, Paradise Lost)

The Mysterious Scrapbook of Dayton

2009-10-11T09:39:00.000-04:00

The other day I finally ventured into the antique mall housed in the county fairgrounds, which is perhaps a mile from home. My plan was to seek lamps, and possibly other useful items of furniture.
Well, there were indeed some tolerable lamps at reasonable prices, and there were some very tempting items of furniture, but it was raining and I didn't have a lot of space in the car, so I put off buying any of those things.
Well, what did I find instead? I found a very odd scrapbook, which I felt strangely compelled to buy.
The compiler of the scrapbook is anonymous, and she (I am sure it was "she") did not divulge her purpose in creating the thing. It is basically a collection of collages of magazine pictures, mostly of babies, but they get older as the series goes on.
Now, those who know me well are aware that I'd rather look at pretty much anything other than baby pictures. Pictures of centipedes, bats, garbage cans, and paramecia will just about always catch my interest above pictures of babies, although I would certainly far rather look at pictures of babies than at pictures of politicians or plutocrats. It's not that I have anything against babies, I just don't care for their appearance, and I prefer to deal with children who can say a few words. (I am, however, fascinated by the mental world of babies. I'd rather see through their eyes than look at them.)
That said, what on earth prompted me to pay for a whole scrapbook of baby pictures?
I'm still trying to figure this out, but it has something to do with the layout. Whoever put this thing together had a good sense of design and page layout. There's also something increasingly odd about it as one pages through. Initially it just seems like a lot of "cute" babies in conjunction with some flowers and animals (mainly doggies, especially poodles). Yet by the end I was being strongly reminded of Hannah Hoch's scrapbooks, which are considerably more mainstream-looking than her other collages. The unknown collagist compiles her images in ways rather like Hoch, and like Hoch, even uses the same pictures in more than one collage.
The images all seem to come from about 1959 to 1969. Some might be earlier but I don't think many can be much later. In fact, I not only recognize some of the sources (Healthtex, Borden, Rice Krispies) but I am just about certain that the artist who drew the pink-cheeked elephants (not shown here) designed one of the baby shower cards my mother received before I appeared in the world.
I'm really curious what the Unknown Collagist was getting at. Did she just want to put together a book of cuteness and not quite succeed? Was it a school assignment of some sort? Was she attempting an Ernstian collage novel about childhood that doesn't quite come off? Inquiring minds want to know.

Maximal Floral

2009-10-10T09:16:00.001-04:00

I try to make it down to the Dayton market every weekend. It's in easy biking distance, but I've discovered that it makes sense to drive: the flower vendor there sells ten bunches for ten dollars, and if you buy ten bunches, he throws in four or five more bunches. I'm not sure exactly what's going on with this floral extravaganza, but this is what I ended up with the first time around.

My most recent purchase got me so many gladioli that I had to use my blender as a vase. I'm now looking for cheap large vases suitable for glads.

Heller plates

2009-10-09T19:50:00.003-04:00

Back in my early youth (as I look upon it from my crochety and occasionally dyspeptic present), I bought some handsome plastic plates and mugs at the local Crate and Barrel store, which in those days was a pretty fine place to shop. Leading as I did a rather maritime life, I didn't want too many breakables.
The said plastics, in an orange-tinged red and a cobalt blue, have been my main plates ever since. Unfortunately, while I'm not sure just how many I originally bought, their numbers have dwindled over the years. I know that a small blue plate, and I believe the blue mug, got smashed by wild airline baggage handlers (my first scanner also bit the dust on that flight). More recently, it seems I must have lost several plates moving, as I know quite well that I had at least five of the large plates in Pittsburgh and somehow only had three when I unpacked. (Where can they have gone?) I really felt that three large plates remaining of what must originally have been six or eight, and two small plates plus two mugs, could not be called a proper supply.
It occurred to me that these fine items--Heller by brand--must still be available somewhere out there. I took to Google and discovered that indeed they are. In fact, they are invariably described as a classic design. They were designed by Massimo Vignelli in the 1960s (no, I did not buy them that long ago) and you can see a fine photo of some of the colors here. They were recently reissued in white (white? how boring) but I was able to find some red ones on Etsy, which arrived today and are in newer, glossier condition than the ones I originally bought long ago. See how splendid they are?

In a fit of enthusiasm, I have now just found and ordered some blue ones on Ebay. While I dislike much mid-twentieth-century design heartily, the Vignelli Heller plates are absolutely divine.

Rabbits Like Stairs

2009-10-03T12:32:00.001-04:00

The attempt to keep rabbits downstairs and out of the office (since its door doesn't close and it is full of tempting papers and boxes):

How Ms. Spots turns barrier into ramp for early-morning explorations of the upper realms:

Baseboards here are too thick (about an inch) for proper deployment of the barrier. It's easy for rabbits to knock over the barrier and bound up the stairs. Calypso Spots knows she's not supposed to do this, but the temptation is too great. After all, she's found packages of stale airline cookies lurking in tote bags up there. What rabbit could ask for a more exciting breakfast?

Of Mice and Lights

2009-10-02T12:19:00.004-04:00

Just the other day, My Sibling remarked that perhaps the days of Lots of Weird Stupid Things Going Wrong were over and I could settle into enjoying life and my teaching and all that sort of thing.
Well, the lights in the bedroom closet have ceased working (again, after a respite--keep in mind the bedroom has no overhead light), and a mouse just ran across the dining room floor. The latter was quite the distraction from my attempts to put together a Powerpoint on ancient Roman art. Is this mouse just passing through, spending a rainy day indoors, or does it live here? How did it get in? Does it have fleas or any unpleasant diseases that it could pass on to Ms. Spots and Orion? Inquiring minds want to know the answers to these questions.
Inquiring minds would also like to know when the temperature in the Creative Arts building will rise a bit. It was not pleasant wearing a turtleneck, jacket, and coat indoors most of yesterday. Still felt bone-chillingly cold in there.

Online Catalogs and their Peculiarities

2009-09-30T09:20:00.006-04:00

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at problems in online library catalog databases and some efforts to fix them.
This is a topic of ongoing interest to me, but I can't say I think the article addresses the problem with sufficient depth, and the comments on the article suggest that I am not alone in thinking so.
We're presented with a specific case: a grad student gets poor and frustrating results when using University of Virginia's Virgo catalog. We aren't told what the Virgo search options are or where in the interface the student typed "Thomas Jefferson." We are told, however, that new and better software is taking over.
I haven't used Virgo, so I don't know how it's set up. But I've used Melvyl, Gladis, PittCat, PittCat+, Library of Congress, WorldCat (and is this or is this not the same as OCLC?), and various other library databases in the US, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain. I'm not a librarian and I don't consider myself an expert on library software, but we could say I have some experience in using and getting used to different catalogs.
In most catalog software I've used, the user chooses whether to put "Thomas Jefferson" into search fields such as author, title, or keyword. This is usually but not always pretty effective. Things aren't always properly catalogued. For instance, when I returned from the Czech Republic, I spent a lot of time looking for materials at UC Berkeley--generally books for which I had full bibliographic data. I was surprised to discover that often the library didn't appear to have a book when I searched by title, but that an author search would bring the book right up. I think the reverse was also true, and that sometimes it was more productive to locate Berkeley books using Melvyl, even though I'd normally Melvyl to see if any library in the UC system (within easy driving distance) had a book.
Some of the new catalog software, however, has you just type in "Thomas Jefferson" without specifying whether you want books by him, about him, with his name mentioned in the keywords, or with his name in some other random location. University of Pittsburgh's new PittCat+ does this, forcing the searcher to spend absurd amounts of time winnowing down the categories to find him as a subject. When I first saw PittCat+, I thought I would like it because it does allow you to narrow the search in ways that I had seen on OCLC, but I rapidly concluded that since you can't start with a focused search as in PittCat "Classic", PittCat+ simply wastes the user's time. This was a complaint I heard repeatedly from librarians and faculty. We learned rapidly that PittCat "Classic," with all its faults, was way quicker and easier to use than its replacement.
I've heard people argue that Google-style searching is the new direction for library catalogs, and I've heard people decry it. Well, surely it should be possible to have both Google-style searching (useful for fairly obscure things) and more focused initial searches. After all, if you want books about Thomas Jefferson, the problem is more likely to be how to narrow down the search, since there must be a plethora of books dealing with various aspects of Jefferson--biographies, histories, political studies, works on plantations and slavery, etc.
One of the people to comment on the Chronicle article argued that what we really need is a return to Library of Congress headings. He or she apparently taught these headings for years and imagines that they are easily learned. I beg to differ. I wouldn't say Library of Congress headings are useless, but back in the early days of online catalogs, I tried searching with them, since in those days UC Berkeley's online catalog used them (maybe it still does, in some hidden place). I'd dig around in the big red books, trying to figure out where in the hierarchy my topic might be. I understood the concept of hierarchy, but--not having taken the commenter's class--I found it impossible to guess which aspect of a topic might be higher on the hierarchy. If I had wanted to look for Czech art, for example, I would have been uncertain whether Czech, Czechoslovakia (this was before the Czech Republic existed), or art would start the string. Fortunately Boolean searches pretty much wiped out that problem. Not that Boolean searches are always simple, but the basics of Boolean searching are easy. Czech and art, or Czechoslovakia and art.
I haven't yet familiarized myself with the catalog here, but I've already had one disturbing experience with it. I wanted to put a volume of the commonly used anthology Art in Theory on reserve for one of my classes. I searched for the title Art in Theory and was shocked to find that apparently the library didn't own any of the three volumes. I therefore (after scanning the pages needed and posting them online) requested that the library order the series. To my great surprise, yesterday I got an email saying that we do actually own the volume in question (apparently not the other two) and that it has been put on reserve for my class. Well, I'd like to know where this book was hiding in the catalog.

Photo Book on the Neighborhood

2009-09-23T12:22:00.002-04:00

A local photographer has just brought out a book exploring my neighborhood, and you can see previews of it here. She's put more focus on the art galleries and restaurants (some of which I've already visited), with some interior shots to go with the exteriors, but a few of the local houses are also shown, including two that are down the street from me (the 1870s house and the ultra-modern house).

The Neighborhood, Part 2

2009-09-21T10:34:00.002-04:00

I wouldn't want it to seem as though everything around me is annoying. It's time for a few more photos of my neighborhood.

And Now for a Moment of Tetchiness

2009-09-18T14:14:00.005-04:00

On the whole, I am settling into my new teaching situation without any real trouble. Faculty and staff have been generally welcoming, and my students (so far as I can tell thus far) are pleasant and friendly, with some good observations to offer in the classroom.
On the other hand, I am disconcerted to receive a small onslaught of student emails that do not really bode well.
For example, a student who apologizes for missing class due to taking care of alleged administrative hassles inquires "Is there anything I missed?" This is the kind of query that tempts me to respond "No, I don't bother to lecture when you aren't there."
Another student asks "Since I missed today, I was wondering if we have any assignments due next week?" While it is better to ask than to miss out, the syllabus does reveal that there is a paper due next week.
Somewhat in the same vein is the question "what is the name of the paper we have to read and where can I find it also do we have to write a feed back to the paper and if so how any pages?" All of this information is on the course website, which is also where the syllabus can be found since (as a cost-cutting measure) we are not supposed to hand out paper syllabi and assignments. For that matter, I did talk about next week's paper yesterday in class.
Finally, another student apologizes for tardiness due to problems in the preceding class, and regrets that telling me so after class would have caused further tardiness. Since it is only the second week of class, I have certainly not learned to match everyone's name and face yet, nor do I notice everyone who slips into a dark classroom late; thus it is essential for me to know who actually showed up so that I do not wrongly penalize lateness as absence; hey, handing me a simple note after class would do the trick if I am (improbably) surrounded by eager students.
It's true that I prefer students to ask even somewhat foolish questions than be too shy or easily embarrassed to ask a question at all, but it would be nice if they thought a bit, too.

Huh?

2009-09-17T22:03:00.002-04:00

And why does Blogger suddenly want me to say I accept its Terms of Service in order to upload a photo of Orion? I've been uploading photos onto Blogger since 2005 and I don't recall having had to accept any such thing in the past...

Around and About

2009-09-14T09:38:00.003-04:00

One or two of my faithful readers have mentioned, offline, that there have been lamentably few posts of late. Or just few--perhaps not lamentably. I shouldn't make assumptions here, but if people are looking to see what's here, I suppose they might want to see something new now and then.
The school year has begun here, rather later than for most of my colleagues at other institutions, and curiously enough various things have settled into place. The fluorescent lights in the bedroom closet, for instance, which stubbornly refused to function for a week or so, went back on last week despite my having done nothing yet in the way of checking the fuse. The toilet-paper holder that had fallen from its mounting finally consented to stay in place again. I can't say that the molding around my windshield has magically stuck properly again, but another call to the glass company will fix that, when I get around to it. (I think their next step will be to replace the window a second time.)
More entertainingly, I have been out in the community taking a look around. I visited the Dayton Art Institute, a very fine small-scale museum. (And free to the public! And in biking or even walking distance from home!) I attended the monthly dinner of the Dayton Area Rabbit Network, where I met other people who live with long-eared beings and made tentative plans to have the Spotted Pair's toenails clipped. I visited the 2nd Street Market--several times, so now I know that Saturday is the day when all the produce vendors show up (I'm not sure, however, that I can take home a pumpkin on my bike until I get actual bike baskets). I was too tired to roam the streets and galleries on the most recent First Friday or the latest Urban Night, but I did get to my neighborhood's last potluck picnic of the summer (my potato salad was devoured and I met neighbors who garden, adopt shelter animals, and like art). I also roamed yesterday's street fair on 5th, which meant I finally set foot in some of the galleries and even bought a couple of things. I didn't sample any of the foods, because I had just eaten Thai food at the aforementioned market, but I enjoyed checking out the various art and jewelry vendors.
I was intrigued by the collage-decoupaged furniture made by one vendor, and seriously considered getting a piece, but since the university is only reimbursing about a third of my moving expenses, I felt protective of my pocketbook and thought I had better be certain that I didn't buy anything over $100 and that any piece of furniture had to be something I would actually use and, of course, that I was particularly drawn to the collage on that particular work. Well, I could in fact use another piece or two of furniture, but the types the vendor had available weren't precisely what I would find most useful in my current residence; some of the pieces I liked the most were out of my price range; etc. I chatted a bit with the artist, who was a bit disgruntled that nothing had sold yet despite people liking the work. I said that I supposed it is harder to sell in this economy, but she assured me that in some cities she's sold lots of pieces recently. It seemed to me that in a bad economy people are more likely to buy art objects that don't cost too much--Archelaus cards sell very well--but the artist was skeptical about that. Well, since I don't have a lot of money and there wasn't one special piece that just called my name, I confess that I didn't get any new furniture. And I daresay the artist wouldn't have liked the thought that, as a person who's done a lot of collage myself, I might someday make my own collaged piece of furniture. But that wouldn't stop me from buying someone else's piece if I thought it was absolutely wonderful. Each person's imagination is a bit different, after all.
And, in fact, shortly after that I talked to a different artist, also a collage artist. He remarked that since he was really broke, he was selling pieces for $20 each. Well, I had admired them earlier but assumed they were expensive, so I hadn't considered buying one. At $20, though, I figured I could get one, and that I didn't even feel like it had to be one I adored, but simply one I kind of liked. He does his collages digitally, so I suppose he can make as many copies as he likes of any individual collage--I'd like to learn to do this, since there are a lot of things I'd like to collage with but don't want to slice up, and for that matter I've found a lot of potential collage sources on BibliOdyssey and other art-related sites. The artist was friendly and local, and indicated he might be up for teaching me how he did some of this. So now I've got one of his collages. I also picked up a couple of art-deco-ish spoon rests from his dealer; I've never used a spoon rest, but the elongated rabbit and dog are pretty neat just as objects.
A ways down the street, I wandered into another gallery, where I was immediately complimented on my Czech linen hat. Next thing I knew, the woman who liked my hat, along with her friend, were giving me directions to the local Czech club, which has frequent dances (not that I have much experience with the polka); great places to hike and ski; and so forth. When these kind people bade me adieu, I took a look at the gallery and saw some works by a few of my new colleagues, which was rather fun.
Most of the time, of course, I have been sitting at home working on my classes, on a postdoc proposal, on journal articles, and on other projects.

Blogger Search Sucks

2009-09-11T11:49:00.003-04:00

Those of you who have been reading blogs for some years have probably noticed that those hosted by Blogger usually have a search bar up at the top of the page. In theory, you can search the blog for mentions of a specific word or phrase.
It used to be that this search worked just fine, or at least I had no reason to believe it didn't. I used it every so often to locate old posts on my own and other people's blogs, and generally I got more results than I expected.
Over the past few months, however, I began to suspect that this search was simply not functioning properly; I'd search for something that I knew was discussed in a blog somewhere, and yet get absolutely no results, or not the specific post I was seeking. This made me panicky; were my friends deleting some of their old posts, or was I searching using the wrong terms, or what?
This morning I wanted to find what Jesse's old Brno blog had to say about Czech trains and train stations. I knew that Jesse had had quite a bit to say on the topic, so I started by searching for "train."
Not a single post came up. Gadzooks, I thought, can he only have mentioned trains in the plural? I did a search for "trains."
One post came up: a post about trams, which parenthetically calls them "street trains" although in English I've usually called them "streetcars" (A Streetcar Named Desire).
I began to feel a little frantic, and searched on "station." Again, I got one post, this one about the Brno train station. And hey, it used the word "train" right in the first sentence, as well as "trains" later on. Why wasn't this post coming up on my previous two searches? And for that matter, I knew Jesse had also blogged about the Prague main train station, about the train known as the Brnensky drak (sorry, my Czech keyboard doesn't want to work just now), and probably about quite a few other train-related matters.
Jesse began the blog well before Blogger introduced labels, and I don't think he added Delicious tags to each post. My own old blog is partly labeled and also has Delicious tags for quite a few posts, but that still doesn't help me find a lot of the old posts. So the reader really does have to rely on the search function to locate old material. It really has to work, and it just isn't anymore.
This annoys me.

Dysfunctionality

2009-08-31T20:37:00.002-04:00

It has been my experience that one periodically goes through times when apparently it is decreed (by some minor and annoying god, no doubt) that an unusual number of things should fail to work, or be recalcitrant, or otherwise drive one somewhat mad.
I have alluded to how the drains on tub, sink, and dishwasher all had to be fixed shortly after I moved in. To update these specific items, the tub proves not to like hair-washing, and its drain clogs after two or three washings; the sink now doesn't really hold water long enough to soak laundry; and the dishwasher (a fancy-looking new Siemens) has to be run every couple of days now because it is apparently a weapon of biological warfare and promptly grows mold on anything placed in it, mold which is only mostly removed during the wash cycle. My previous dishwasher could accumulate dishes for a couple of weeks without mold growth, and removed pretty much everything except dairy-related encrustations. (I could also fit a lot more dishes in that one without wondering whether they would dance around and break one another.)
Speaking of things that go bad, they are doing so at a record pace in the refrigerator. I didn't think refrigerated fruit usually had to be eaten within a day or two. Let's keep in mind, too, that the house is air-conditioned, so we're not dealing with a sweltering kitchen.
Then there was the adventure of the blender. I hadn't had a blender in quite some time, but thought that if I got one, I could make fruit smoothies and rapidly boost the amount of fruit in my diet, as I imagined that would be simpler than making fruit salad. I bought the blender and put it together according to the instructions, or so it seemed, but it dismantled itself and dribbled a lot of liquefied fruit everywhere. For that matter, the stuff I was able to salvage didn't taste nearly as good as a fruit salad would have. I have been hesitant about trying the blender again, since I'm sure the motor got inundated with fruit and water, and I'm not sure that I've put the apparatus together any better than before.
I am not sure that the vacuum cleaner is picking up much, although I replaced its bag just before moving here.
On the automotive front, about a month ago I had my windshield replaced due to the remarkable size and quantity of debris thrown at it by various trucks. I was very pleased with the replacement for at least a week or two... specifically when I moved... and the rubber molding around it came loose. The job being under lifetime warranty, a technician came out to fix it once I finally had a chance to schedule an appointment. It has now come loose again.
While the windshield problem was initially alarming (at first I thought the windshield might fly off as I drove down Highway 70), it has not been as troublesome as the car airconditioning, which I had fixed in two separate ways during the summer to the tune of well over $1000. The airconditioning gave out again as I left Chicago and I have really not had time to schedule an appointment with the shop that did the original work.
I may not have mentioned previously that the electricity in the garage gave out just after I moved in (fortunately with the garage door open rather than closed, or I would have been stuck at home for awhile), but my landlord and his able assistant were able to rewire the building in less than a day, so perhaps that doesn't count as remarkably troublesome.
In the realm of the internet, as I have noted earlier, the signal came into the building well before I was able to make use of it. This was because the DSL modem I had gotten from Verizon stubbornly subverted everything from AT&T. I still don't understand how this can be, but that was what the AT&T technical staff, who tried quite a few tests, concluded. People often complain about technical support, but I felt the people I dealt with were pretty clever and well trained, and they were nonetheless stymied. On the plus side here, however, the new modem is also a router, so I have wifi all over the house. This is an excellent thing since the lapine contingent wants me in sight.
Speaking of the lapines, I knew I would have to keep them out of the office (cords and boxes) and possibly the bedroom. As it turned out, the office door doesn't close--it gets to about two inches of closed and then quits. So I bought a handsome pet gate, one with wire since Ms. Spots has been known to destroy plastic gates. Well, it is designed to be pulled as wide as the doorway or other passageway and to stay in place with the aid of rubber bumpers. Whether this actually normally works, I cannot say, but the height and thickness of the baseboards here make it impossible to keep in position as designed. I thus stuck the thing at the foot of the stairs, sort of leaning against the stairs a bit. Mostly this works, but Ms. Spots rapidly figured out that if it's tilted enough, she can climb on it and go up the stairs anyway. She's always rather surprised when she succeeds, and since what she always seems to want is breakfast, this hasn't caused a real problem yet... but it could.
That's more than enough ranting for now.

The Neighborhood, Part 1

2009-08-25T09:40:00.003-04:00

I suspect that my readers--at least those who know me personally, which is most of you--have been itching to see what sort of place I've landed in, other than the moving boxes and unpacked books.
My neighborhood is called the Oregon Historic District, and it's one of several historic neighborhoods in the central part of town. Most of the houses seem to have been built between 1840-1865 or thereabouts, although not all of them have date placards on the front. I don't know when mine was built, other than that the front half looks like other houses in the neighborhood and the part I live in was added on at a later (but not terribly recent) date.
Most of the houses are brick (often painted), with some sort of wooden trim and usually a porch or veranda with columns.
It's a nice place to walk or bike.

The Veranda, Again

2009-08-24T09:56:00.003-04:00

I was awakened this morning by the sound of Orion making his way upstairs. Rather than wreaking havoc, he consented to lie down in the bedroom and be petted. His real mission, however, was to get me downstairs to provide breakfast and morning petting for the Princess of Pittsburgh, who came up herself when I didn't stay downstairs long enough to suit her. She was a bit miffed that I hadn't kept her company during breakfast.
In the meantime, there are non-rabbit photos:

Looking up at the veranda from the sidewalk. And a view from the veranda, looking across the street:

The tenant in the front half of the duplex does the gardening and the hanging plants. I have added a batch of plants around my front door, however. In addition to flowers, I got some rainbow chard and parsley, but these aren't really growing enthusiastically enough to feed Ms. Spots and Orion. Only enough to take off a few leaves every few days.

I Hate Things Not Working Properly

2009-08-23T11:30:00.004-04:00

Since I won't have usable internet at home for awhile, there won't be much appearing here for at least a few more days, or so I imagine. Technically there is internet... DSL flows through the phone line... but for some reason the modem I had gotten from Verizon refuses to let AT&T's bandwidth get through to the browser. Why this should be is a great mystery to me. I consider myself fairly competent with computers--after all, I use lots of different programs, I install new parts from time to time, and I can troubleshoot a fair number of things. But this doesn't make me an expert on anything in particular. How the Verizon modem can tell that the bandwidth flowing through it isn't Verizon's, I really don't know. The computer recognizes that it's getting a signal, but it's unable to make any use whatsoever of it.
So I await a new modem. I hope it won't only work with AT&T, since there's no guarantee I'll stay in AT&T territory for long.
For variety, I offer a photo of my front porch. Or is that my side porch? Let's just call it the veranda I share with the front tenant.

Seen on Facebook...

2009-08-22T11:11:00.000-04:00

"Nothing improves one's perpective faster than being suddenly incapable of reproduction. Made me feel better."
(Re a comment on the need to spay a rabbit)

Something Completely Different

2009-08-21T10:44:00.003-04:00

As a change from photos relating to moving, I present a couple of photos from last Friday's birthday party in San Francisco. As it happens, no photos were taken of the guest of honor, as the other guests were too busy discussing literature and world politics.

Above: Cesar, Betty, and Scott

Above: John, Ali, and Moazzam

Update, Update, Huh?

2009-08-20T21:23:00.002-04:00

I was rather hoping to post some photos on this visit to the local cafe (it looks as though I won't have functional home internet for at least another week, and possibly more, due to a mysterious incompatibility between the modem Verizon supplied me two years ago and AT&T's DSL service). Regrettably, my camera battery seems to die every time I get halfway to the cafe. I'm not sure why this is. I don't take THAT many pictures of my neighborhood in the course of two blocks. Perhaps there is some strange force-field on the corner of Sixth and Tecumseh. In any case, sooner or later there will be some photos again.
Mainly, at the moment I simply feel relieved at having finished and sent off the latest journal article, which was not so much a difficult one to write as one whose writing coincided with my having no real blocks of time to devote. This caused me considerable anxiety, since I also had to think about various bills, car repairs, prescriptions, and so on.
Meanwhile, I see the cafe is dimming its lights, which I think means it is time to drink up and depart.

On the Verge of Success?

2009-08-19T11:01:00.003-04:00

As is so often the case, Rob Breszny offers a tantalizing horoscope for me:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Your strategies are very close to working. The results you've generated so far are almost useful, bordering on successful, and on the brink of being beautiful. My question now is: You won't stop here, will you? You've already garnered a measure of recognition. You've gotten a taste of victory over your old bugaboos. Will you be satisfied with these partial breakthroughs, or will you fight and kick and scratch to strip away the almosts and ascend to utter triumph?

We've managed to unblock the drains in my tub, bathroom sink, and dishwasher, and the internet is almost working at home now (it exists, but the computer and modem are unsure how to handle it). Of course, I don't think these things are really what's involved here. Or even that journal article I'm racing to finish. There are more important things at stake.

The Land of Boxes and Stray Books

2009-08-09T08:52:00.004-04:00

Remember how harmonious the last kitchen photo seemed? Well, of course, it was taken prior to the delivery of most of my belongings, so it was a bit unnatural. The kitchen quickly began to look like the following photo, and rapidly transmogrified into a complete disaster area, since although there are many cupboards, it's hard to know where anything ought to go. I mean, most of the storage is out of my reach or too narrow or shallow to accommodate what I might want to put inside. On the plus side, I discovered that there is a lazy susan. Major bonus points there! (Although I wish it could have been a full round one rather than 3/4.)

The dining room is in recovery from being The Land of Full Boxes, but I am not sure that being The Land of Empty Boxes is much better. Yes, there is a so-called "mudroom" and it is also full of boxes. (Is "mudroom" a recently invented term or has it been around for more than ten years? It's used copiously in every home design magazine I've read in recent years and I am wondering whether Martha Stewart invented it. She did not, I am sure, invent the concept.) The mudroom/laundry room has to reserve space for bike and rabbit area.

Moving right along to the living room, although most people will probably see it first, books are gradually finding their way onto shelves, although not in a very coherent order. The main thing has been to get them in some approximation of the right place, not to get them exactly right on the first try. Besides, there's not a real exactly right about book placement. Shelving by topic wars with shelving by approximate size. Besides, even shelving by topic is tricky. Do we want Alberti shelved with Italian Renaissance or with architecture? Do we want Paula Modersohn-Becker's diary shelved with German art, biography, or women artists? This problem worsens with the history books, although they are fewer in number. Should all history simply go upstairs in my office, or can some of it stay in the dining room? Can we just have Central and Eastern European history upstairs, or just women's/gender/sex history? Why am I separating histories of European paganism from the fairytale books? I am so glad not to be a librarian. No classification system will ever fully satisfy me. And, considering that most of my theater and film books are boxed up in California, how did I end up with so many such books here, which clearly need to go together? (Or should those on the avant-garde, or on Czech film and theater, go somewhere else?!)

My office, rapidly becoming a repository of boxes of miscellaneous papers (not shown!), is coming along well enough in other respects. The tall bookcase is pretty much entirely filled with Czech art books, although there is some overflow (five of said books are much too big to fit on its shelves and sit on the desk). The desk is home to lots of dictionaries and related books, in the optimistic belief that I will actually use them rather than merely regard them as a kind of security feature.

And it all continues. After all, that mudroom has to be prepared to hold a new two-story bunny condo (bought on the theory that the rabbits might enjoy it as a special place to hang out), and the downstairs in general has to be prepared for their arrival on the seventeenth. Meanwhile, of course, there's no shortage of academic sort of work to do, unfortunately. I certainly hope I don't have to move again next summer.

Moving In

2009-08-08T20:01:00.004-04:00

Moving in is quite the ongoing process. At first everything looks relatively stark:

Subsequent to the arrival of one's belongings, one also becomes all too aware of how a great many of them clash with the paint:

After all, bedding, kitchen items, and so forth based heavily in cobalt and other forms of blue just don't go very well with walls the color of coffee ice cream. Nothing against coffee ice cream, it just clashes with quite a few common decorating schemes. It wants colors like cream, dark brown, and black.
Fortunately I already owned more than one shower curtain, for just this sort of situation, so swapping out the leafy pale blue and green one for something more sultry was easy:

Stay tuned for more on the decorating front!

A Little Hoffmeister

2009-08-07T09:22:00.006-04:00

Why is it that my friends invariably link to me just when I haven't posted anything very remarkable in awhile? I'm afraid it is just fate (in this case, my having just moved and not yet having internet at home).
Well, for everyone's entertainment, I offer two Adolf Hoffmeister pieces:

"The Founding of Devětsil," 1927

"Pisces," 1963

Adolf Hoffmeister was a Czech artist and writer (not to mention diplomat). I'd say more, but I really must return home and continue unpacking several hundred (or is it thousand?) books. That is, I know I've unpacked several hundred, but at least 30 boxes of something or other have yet to be opened.

Good Omens

2009-08-05T11:33:00.003-04:00

Rob Breszny's horoscope for me this week:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): If you really knew how much you were loved, you would never cry again. A sublime relaxation would flood your nervous system, freeing you to see the beautiful secrets that your chronic fear has hidden from you. If you knew how much the world longs for your genius to bloom in its full glory, the peace that filled you would ensure you could not fail. You'd face every trial with eager equanimity. You would always know exactly what to do because your intuition would tell you in a myriad of subtle ways. And get this: A glimpse of this glory will soon be available to you.

It's possible I have some inkling of all this wonderful stuff. That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to all the unpacking and other work ahead of me, but nonetheless I feel pretty good.

Magnets

2009-07-29T17:34:00.003-04:00

The refrigerator after the removal of the magnetic poetry and before removal of magnets (and why is this photo so blurry?).

And the file cabinet after removal of all postcards and the like. Note large number of magnets from the UPM. Unfortunately some of my non-Czech magnets disappeared on the way back from Prague... Ah, the vicissitudes of moving.

Well, all the magnets have been packed now and and the entire apartment looks like the site of a natural disaster! Only one more packing day left.

The View from Here

2009-07-26T09:22:00.005-04:00

Apart from the fact that Ms. Spots and Orion are presently visiting my parents, this is what the living room looks like just now (albeit the piles of boxes are much taller).
I'm not sure how Orion failed to get into more of these pictures. He was very much interested in studying the ways of removing tape from boxes, and will come in very handy when it comes time to unpack.

Archelaus Cards Arrive in Pittsburgh!

2009-07-25T14:44:00.000-04:00

Top right on the display, get your Archelaus cards at Kards Unlimited in Shadyside!

Sweden's Water Fairy of the Year

2009-07-24T08:40:00.000-04:00

I feel sure my readers will want to know all about the Swedish competition for Water Fairy of the Year, which was recently won by a naked saxophone player. I noticed, however, that the Swedish TV clip about the event merely interviewed some people and showed the contestants (well, the latter was worthwhile) but failed to include any of the music played. Does this mean that the sax player won for the beauty of his floral garlands rather than for the tempting sound of his music?

Susie Bright, Dadaist

2009-07-23T08:58:00.002-04:00

I daresay most people read Susie Bright's blog for the news on things sex- and gender-related, but that's not all you can find there!
See, for example, Susie's dream about having the Obamas over to dinner! Surrealists the world over are probably in a state of envy at this dream.
And the dadaist post on 1000 bunnies listening to Obama (be sure to click on her link to the full bunny collection!) I want Susie's bunny notepad. (Although the original artist stuck the bunny's scut in the middle of its back rather than where it belongs, so Orion and Calypso Spots would be perturbed about that.)

Barberini Faun Appears Unexpectedly in Pittsburgh

2009-07-22T11:02:00.005-04:00

A colleague and I were recently (well, perhaps a month or so ago, but let's not quibble, I only just learned how to download photos from my phone) chatting in the Frick Fine Arts Library, only to find ourselves suddenly distracted by this:

We had thought that the Barberini Faun (aka Sleeping Satyr) was safely settled at Munich's Glyptothek.

But I guess not. Looks like he's had a haircut on the trip west. And gotten dressed. Too bad.

On the Road to Where?

2009-07-19T09:42:00.003-04:00

During the course of my trip east (post-Mexico), I stopped to visit various friends, among them Dr. Zaius, who gave me this spiffy helmet and directed me to look fierce for the photos. I'm not sure I was dressed suitably for the photo shoot, however. It looks more like I'm preparing for a long battle with the weeds on the front steps.

Uxmal

2009-07-18T09:03:00.000-04:00

The blogging it has been a bit slow given that first I went to Mexico and then I drove across country, after which I commenced (make that re-commenced) boxing up my belongings.
I will say, however, that I thought the ruins at Uxmal were outstanding.

More photos of the trip here.

Antioch College Revived?

2009-07-02T11:54:00.000-04:00

Antioch College, one of the most venerable non-traditional liberal arts colleges in the US, closed awhile back for (what else?) financial reasons, but it looks as though the school could reopen.
It would be a pretty neat if they can pull this off.

Illustrated Jocularity

2009-07-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

For those who like old books, cartoons, and weird stuff in general, I recommend a look at the blog Wondermark!

Academic Discussions

2009-06-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

An article in today's online Chronicle of Higher Education asks whether academic e-mail lists, notably those hosted by H-Net, are moribund. Some scholars claim that blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are taking their place.
As a scholar who's used all of these except Twitter (and I'm not a stranger to Twitter, I just don't use it), my reaction was that this was ridiculous. Why?
Blogs, due to the flexibility of the form, have an important place (or should) in the scholarly world. Individuals and groups blog on a wide variety of topics. On the other hand, I think few people really want to keep track of more than about ten active blogs. Sure, you can read your blogs via a feed, but the more blogs you track, the less likely you are to notice that any individual blog has a new post. The feed doesn't show the discussion that a post has prompted, either.
Facebook is good for keeping track of friends, and some academic exchange does take place, but the scholarly is easily lost amid the more social material. More significantly, to post something of any length on Facebook, you have to put it in a Note, and comments of any significant length have to go in other Notes because the comment field only allows a certain number of characters (I'm not sure how many, but it's not a lot). Besides, while you can group your contacts within Facebook, there isn't really any good way of separating academe from everything else. I know there are some ways around this--one person I know has a Facebook identity for use with friends and a separate one for use with students, but since many of his friends are also colleagues, I think many of the links get posted in both places.
Twitter seems particularly unsuited to take over. With a 140-character limit to each Twitter message, that's a medium with severe limitations. You can broadcast your headline news with it, but how much humanities discussion is something you want to read in capsule form?
Thus, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter all have their uses, but their uses are rather different from the uses of listservs. I think I subscribe to about six academic lists, plus a shifting number of lists relating to software and other topics, which can get me up to something like twenty simultaneous lists at times. Obviously I don't read all of these messages, and I certainly don't read them all right when they arrive. But there they are, I've got them, and the ones I don't delete are categorizable and searchable. In one of those moments of semi-brain-deadness, I can go through a batch of art history or Slavic emails and see what's happening.
This, however, gets to one of the other points made in the Chronicle piece. While listservs are great for disseminating conference announcements, job postings, and book reviews, their use as a means of actual discussion has dwindled.
The amount of discussion depends on the list, though, and this has a lot to do with the number of subscribers. Too few subscribers, and the list has nothing to say; too many, and it gets noisy until people either unsubscribe or turn it into an announcement-only list. H-ArtHist has no discussion that I can see, just announcements, most of which are of no particular interest to me. This is not surprising, considering the list tries to cover the entire field, internationally. The likelihood of my hopping on a plane at the last minute to attend tomorrow's German symposium on (I'm making this up) dog iconography in 15th century Japan is pretty small. But other lists do have discussion, particularly about books people have read or want to read. H-HistSex has pretty good discussion (as it ought to!) and often H-Women does as well. Not endless discussion, but readable.
I'm not sure how the question of scholarly discussion should be resolved. The historians have the benefit of all the littler special-interest lists, which can sustain some specific discussions, but as far as I can tell, the art historians are pretty much stuck with one non-discussion list. HGCEA sends out email to its members, but I wouldn't call that a discussion list. Likewise AAH. But perhaps I'm missing something.
Where are all those art-history discussions, anyway?

Anniversary

2009-06-29T23:09:00.000-04:00

My parents claim that they're still glad they got married.

TransMarch 2009

2009-06-28T15:38:00.000-04:00

Cesar and I headed out to San Francisco's Dolores Park on Friday night to lend our support for Transgender rights.

We liked the multilingual announcement.

Cesar's neighbor was one of the performers.

I liked this person's outfit quite a bit.

The ASL interpreter was spectacular!

And the parade was good.

Nostalgia of a Sort

2009-06-26T17:53:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I was examining the lists my mother kindly made, before I ran off to graduate school, of all the belongings that are boxed up and sitting in my parents' shed. It is a melancholy undertaking.
Box 13, for example, holds an awful lot of books by Colette, Josef Škorecký, Heinrich Böll, and Italo Calvino, as well as two novels by Jane Austen, my copy of André Breton's Nadja, Borges's Ficciones, and some Kundera.
Box 139, rather more recently boxed up, includes Goethe's Werther (which I haven't yet read) and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (which I am anxious to read again).
It would be nice to know when I will be permanently reunited with my boxes, and when I will actually have time to read anything that is in them.