Waiting and Prepping

Well, Magnetic Woman has officially been out since December, but printing errors (most of the index missing, color plates out of order) caused the book to have to be reprinted, so I am still waiting to get author copies that will be acceptable to send to the various museums and others who helped along the way. It's just hard--bad enough to have my book come out during a pandemic, but then to have to pretty much pull it from circulation and reprint...!

Meanwhile, I've been asking some fellow writers for blurbs for In Search of the Magic Theater, which should be out next summer, and I've been putting together an author website through the Authors Guild. Plus also fiddling with new novels--some of which are close to done (I want to finish at least one this summer) and some of which are just in the formative stages. I can't do a whole lot with them during the semester since with the pandemic I'm doing a lot of extra work on my remote courses, but a little bit here and a little bit there eventually adds up to finished novels.

For those of you who teach music, my friends Sam Dorf and Heather MacLachlan, with Julia Randel, have published a brand new anthology for Gateways to Understanding Music! Sam says, "It is designed to help make Rice and Wilson's textbook suitable for music majors and minors and allow them opportunity to work with a wide variety of musical scores from Western Art Music, Jazz, Popular, and Global music cultures." Use the link below and enter the discount code HSM20: https://bit.ly/2KuoEK2

Approaching Thanksgiving...

It's been an exciting time lately--or at least interesting--what with the drama of the US election, the rising fall coronavirus infections, and even some more normal things like scholarly conferences.

On the conference topic, I've just emerged from two weekends of the annual ASEEES conference (normally just one weekend, but on Zoom it was spread out to avoid complete Zoom fatigue) and one day of hosting our annual regional Riess undergraduate art history symposium. I enjoyed both, and am so proud of my four students who participated in Riess (two with papers from my American art class, two with Renaissance topics mentored by my colleague Dr. Caroline Hillard).

At ASEEES, I gave a paper myself on the Czech surrealists' struggles with other leftists during the 1930s (you can read more about this topic in Magnetic Woman) and presided over the annual membership meeting of the Czechoslovak Studies Association. The CSA has had a bit of a rough year along with everyone else, and we gave members a dues holiday for 2020, but we look forward to getting back to our normal level of activity (or better than that, we hope) and are instituting a new prize. Currently members can compete for a biannual book prize and a biannual article prize (alternating years), and now we will be offering an annual essay prize for undergraduate students writing on Czech/Czechoslovak topics. That includes topics involving Roma or Germans or Hungarians or Jews in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia. Or, for that matter, Vietnamese in the current Czech Republic. Geography defines our prizes, not ethnicity.

Magnetic Woman was to launch early this month at ASEEES, but with the conference being via Zoom, and physical copies not yet having arrived from the printer, this did not happen. Normally the press would have displayed cover art and maybe a printout, and taken orders if the copies had not arrived on time. Ah well... We currently expect copies near the end of the month.

But, of course, you can order your copy (or ask your library to order one) right now and it should arrive in the very near future!

I hope everyone has a pleasant, but most importantly a safe, Thanksgiving. (Well, that's in the US. Canada has an earlier Thanksgiving and the holiday is not to my knowledge held elsewhere except among expats.)

Course Revision, Ceaseless

It's that time of year when I begin to feel the upcoming school year breathing down my neck. I always find this rather sad, because when I was a student, July and August were lovely vacation months and then once school started (whether in September or in late August) I was always happy to go back.

But of course for those of us who teach, we work pretty much year-round whether or not we teach in the summer. And the latter part of the summer is when things need to be readied for fall.

Now, back when I was on the job market, I envisioned having about three years ahead of intensive course invention, after which I assumed I'd just do some tweaks to existing courses and occasionally create a whole new course on some exciting topic. And this is how it is for many professors. Once they've got their basic set, it's kind of up to them how much to change and when to create something new.

Alas, that's not exactly how my life has gone. While I'm grateful that I got a good job and have congenial colleagues and union faculty and so on, allow me to whine a little, because we all need to kvetch about something or other from time to time.

When I was teaching in grad school, we were on a semester schedule with 15 weeks of class. I created some courses.

I was hired (yay!) but for a quarter schedule. I was also, for the time being, the only person teaching western art, and most of our students took more than six years to graduate. I needed to change all my semester courses to quarter courses and create a lot of new courses.

However, we were also not going to stay on quarters--we were going to switch to a 14-week semester schedule. (Note that previously my semester had been 15 weeks!) After three years of creating quarter courses, I needed to turn them into semester courses. And also make everything taught in the fall go from twice a week to thrice a week, because by that time I wasn't the only person teaching western art and it wouldn't have been fair to make one person teach three times a week all year on the new schedule when the other person got to teach twice a week all year.

The thrice-a-week schedule did not work very well for us because all of the studio courses were twice-a-week (Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday), and students, not surprisingly, did not want to come to campus for a 50-minute class on Friday when they had no other reason to be there. So they'd sometimes take three art history courses per semester, which was hard for most of them to handle because the upper-level art history courses are all writing intensive.

We came up with a new plan, which was for both art historians to teach Tuesday-Thursday plus a once-a-week course on Monday or Wednesday. I'm happy with this, so long as I get to choose which course to put in that once-a-week slot. Because not everything works well taught like that. You really need to be able to break up the lecture-and-discussion with films and activities. And so, I've found that this works pretty well for Surrealism and for Modern Design, and tolerably for Women in Art, but it just is not great for Czech Modernism because there are really no films in English on that topic. And note that every time I've taught Czech Modernism I've had to revise the time blocks; Women in Art has also had its time blocks shifted frequently.

After we adopted the Tuesday-Thursday-plus-one schedule, I thought I would finally be able to focus my revisions on making actual improvements to the courses rather than on juggling the time slots, but of course this year we had a whole new problem: COVID-19.

Yep, in the spring I had basically three days to figure out how to take my courses "remote," and now I'm trying to figure out how to more effectively take another one remote for the whole semester plus create my own remote version of a gen-ed course that I've never previously had to teach. Plus, of course, we may need to teach remotely in the spring as well. Hell's bells, for all I know I may need to teach remotely for the rest of my career in higher ed! And I am one of those professors who has always said I would not teach online, because I would rather work face to face with my students.

You can see why I lament and complain. I'm grateful not to be a K-12 teacher who will probably have no choice at all about how to teach in the fall, but still. I'd much rather focus on making my courses better than on simply making sure they can happen at all.

Will They Finish?

As we near the end of the semester--just a few weeks to go--the question looms: how many of my students just aren't going to be able to finish their courses?

I've repeatedly asked that students who are having difficulties, such as lack of internet access, should let me know, and a few have. I'm pretty sure most can get email on their phones, and early on they could still go to the library or a cafe to use public computers or wifi. But it seems probable that I haven't heard from everyone who will be unable, for one reason or another, to finish. Apparently one-sixth of households in the area do not have internet, often because they cannot afford it (the elderly also often lack internet, but while my students are of many ages, they don't tend to be elderly). Spectrum has offered 60 days of free internet to students, but how many have read the emails telling them that?

My largest class, the Renaissance to now survey, has a short paper due today. Originally this paper involved choosing from a list of artworks on view at our local museum, but that had to be changed to a list from those the museum displays online. There is also a small amount of required research using online databases. It will be interesting, and possibly depressing, to see how many students turn in the paper. One of my other classes had a paper due a week ago, which also involved looking at art in person (so an alternate form of the assignment had to be done for those who hadn't begun the paper before our gallery closed); despite the alternate instructions, only two-thirds of the class turned in a paper. (True, most of those people didn't turn in their first paper either, so coronavirus may not be implicated at all there!)

My third, smallest class has one big research paper rather than two shorter papers. Some of those students seem to have completely disappeared. There is not much I can do if people do not let me know they're struggling, but it's disturbing to know that, whether for lack of internet, lack of quiet time, illness, or other reasons, a significant percentage of my students may not be able to finish their courses this semester.

How's Working at Home Working Out?

My state doesn't have an actual shelter-in-place order, but since my governor has been in the forefront of those closing down potential sites of contagion, we're fairly close to sheltering in place. Bars are closed unless they also offer take-out sales (food or containers of beer); restaurants and cafes are take-out and delivery only; theaters are closed; hair salons are closed (just before my appointment, rats!). Etc. A whole lot of us are working from home now.

As a writer and professor, I'm already pretty accustomed to working from home. Even my work for school is largely done from home, because my office at school is in a windowless concrete-block space and I use it for two main things: meeting with students and storing art books.

At home, I normally work on a laptop, although I do still have a desktop machine bought around 2005. The desktop still functions, but I got it shortly before CD drives also read DVDs, shortly before USB 2.0, and shortly before wifi became common. So it's not as practical as it might be. Besides, the laptop allows me to move around in the house as well as (when it was possible) working elsewhere.

Since I live in a part of the country where home ownership is possible for a) people who aren't all that highly paid and/or b) weren't in a position to buy back when housing prices were more affordable throughout the US, I currently live in a house with quite a range of potential work spaces. It's a Victorian in what was once a working-class neighborhood, and in recent decades the attic was turned into living space, so I have two floors plus an unfinished basement where the furnace lives. But what does this translate to in actual work-at-home practice?

Well, let me begin by saying I like my house a lot and enjoy being in it. But it's not ideally designed for working at home even though I can and do work in no fewer than eight different locations in it--I'm currently seated at the foot of the stairs beside a large window, where the bookcase to my left holds fiction A to G and the bookcase to my right holds pocket-size nonfiction and foreign language books. This current spot is good for light and the chair is comfortable, but sometimes the light is too bright, often the air is cold, and it's not a part of the house where rabbits are allowed.

Most of the spaces in my house where I work, like my bedroom, my so-called office, my front room, and my living room, get very little natural light. My upstairs rooms are extremely hot in the summer and one of them (the one with good daytime light) is cold in the winter. Since I teach (normally) in a darkened room and meet with students in a windowless room, I want natural light the rest of the day!

In other words, while my house is a pretty neat place with an interesting variety of spots where I can and do work, under normal circumstances I also do a lot of my work at cafes and libraries. There are two cafes in my own neighborhood, several more within walking distance, and the public library is also in walking distance, while the university library is a good place to work when I'm on campus and not holding class or office hours. Well, at present the libraries are closed and the cafes are take-out only, so while I do try to support them by getting the occasional take-out, I'm working solely at home.

So far, it's okay--and I'm in a much better situation than many, many other people--but I really do miss going to the cafes and libraries!

Closing Down Campus for Safety

We're in our first week of "remote" instruction here and the situation continues to develop. Initially, our university library, computer labs, studios, and offices remained open. But then the library closed (I know our library staff breathed a sigh of relief!), and now pretty much everything on campus is closing as far as I can tell. At any rate, the Art Office, studios, labs...

As for teaching, well, it isn't exactly going all that smoothly for many of us. Those who wanted to put lectures online or even hold synchronous online discussions are reporting some problems. If nothing else, lots of students don't have very reliable internet access or are trying to take care of their kids or elderly parents.

So far, I've tried giving assignments that are fairly open-ended, but I'm having trouble with students (even my one MA student from another department) not reading the instructions very well. When the instructions say that I've put a list of suggested films on our course site, I don't want to have people emailing asking if I can give them a list (but they've done so). When the instructions say to post info about museum web sites on Discussion Board and discuss, I don't want people emailing me or the whole class with what they've found (but they've done so). When I say to watch as many films as they can, I don't want to be asked "how many do you want us to watch?" (but they've done so).

I get that they are feeling discombobulated and stressed out, and I know I don't always pick up key information when I read either. It's just that each unnecessary email of that kind takes time to deal with, makes me worry that a whole lot more are about to arrive, and takes my focus away from grading take-home exams, commenting on actual Discussion Board posts, and planning how to go forward.

Face-to-Face Classes Go "Remote"

Last Tuesday, my colleague in Art History and I were making final plans about order of program for the Riess Undergraduate Art History Colloquium, which we were scheduled to host on March 28. The Riess is an annual regional opportunity for art history students (not necessarily majors) to present their work and receive feedback from a small and friendly audience, and we were excited that we'd be hosting the event for the first time.

Alas, it was not to be. No sooner had we gone home to feed our pets before meeting again for a more relaxed supper, than we received word that face-to-face courses would be going "remote" for the rest of March due to the spreading coronavirus pandemic and that events would need to be postponed or cancelled. By the end of the week, the "remote" instruction had been expanded to the remainder of the semester. It's possible we may be able to postpone the Riess until fall, but many of the students may have graduated by then and would not be available.

My university, of course, is by no means the only or even the first in the US to make this move. A growing number of colleges and universities are shifting to "remote," and soon I heard that the annual Czech and Slovak Workshop, which my alma mater the University of Pittsburgh was about to host for the first time, was also not going to occur as scheduled. Like Riess, the Workshop is all about discussion of the participants' research, except that the Workshop has historically been for advanced graduate students and early career scholars with a sprinkling of established scholars.

But events aside, what does "remote" instruction mean? Most faculty have never taught online courses and are not prepared to do so; creating an online course involves a whole lot of work above and beyond that involved in most face-to-face courses.

Expectations for "remote" instruction will vary from school to school, department to department, and course to course. My university has, fortunately, made clear that it need not mean creating the kind of online course that one might do in the normal course of things. After all, students in face-to-face courses did not sign up expecting to have an online education. Not all students have internet at home. Not all students own a computer. (These facts may amaze you, but they are facts, not fake news.) So, expecting everyone to have constant access, and bandwidth for, synchronous lectures and discussion, or what-have-you, is not realistic or fair to less-advantaged students (which means many of my own students). Sure, most students these days do have a smartphone, but I sure would not like to have to expect them to do large amounts of coursework on their phones.

I don't know what my colleagues in studio are doing beyond allowing students to work at home and in our studios (which remain open for now), but we are being allowed a good deal of latitude in figuring out alternate assignments. For now, I've asked my students to watch as many art-related films as they can and write discussion posts about them. This naturally requires some internet access, but I'm not assigning specific films. Our library is still open and so some films can be watched on VHS or DVD. Any art-related films are acceptable (although for each class I've provided a list of options pertinent to the course--good thing I'm not teaching Czech Modernism this semester!), they just need to have enough internet access to discuss what they've seen. Meanwhile, I have an exam to redo to be take-home, a paper assignment to be rewritten since the museum is closed, and so on.

Hoping the pandemic is soon over, but not feeling too optimistic about that for now.

Novels and More Novels! And Scholarly Stuff Too!

This semester has been an unusually easy and pleasant one, as in addition to a full and reasonably engaged class of students for North American Art to 1900, I've been teaching a smaller Honors course on Surrealism, which has been simply delightful. This lighter than usual load has enabled me to get a lot of writing done, which is a very fine thing.

As noted awhile back, over the summer I succeeded in finishing one of the novels that I'd been working on off and on over the years. Once it had been read and commented on by one of my fiction-writer friends, I made some fixes and have now submitted it to a small number of contests and presses.

Meanwhile, a novel completed earlier--In Search of the Magic Theater--which I've been submitting with some vigor to small presses after giving up on agent submissions (these people apparently can't figure out how to use Submittable to send polite rejections, but simply let one wonder, month after month), was named a finalist for the Eludia Award. This award is given to a woman over forty who has not yet published a book-length work of fiction. The list of finalists was fairly long, but still, it was neat to find myself on such a list. The winner of the 2019 competition is Elise Atchison, for Crazy Mountain, which will be published by the Hidden River Arts Sowilo Press.

I had expected to spend August slaving over course prep and scholarly projects, but felt compelled to get going on what I thought would be a novella, set in the Trump Era. (Era? Well, it has seemed long enough to call an era.) It turned out to be a short novel rather than a novella, and was done in mid-October. As it begins with the 2016 election, it's not something I exactly enjoyed writing, but I hope that readers find it at least reasonably interesting. Parts of it are, at least--to my mind--funny. On the other hand, it doesn't leave out climate crisis, the Mueller Report, or ailments often suffered by persons nearing retirement age.

And then there have been the scholarly projects! During the first week of school, I escaped for a brief period to attend the second annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, where I presented a paper on Toyen during a panel on Central European female surrealists. I meant to blog about this conference, which was fabulous, but was (apparently) too busy writing fiction to do so.

I then had to get cracking on my paper for the ASEEES conference, where I will be presenting on the Czech surrealists Nezval and Štyrský as Prague flâneurs, for a panel Chad Bryant and I put together on walking in Prague. I have now sent it to the discussant and merely need to do the Powerpoint; and also read the papers on Toyen that I will be discussant for.

Finally, or perhaps not so finally, I have a book chapter on Toyen due in December for an edited volume. I have got this just about wrapped up, but not quite.

As next semester I can expect to be teaching over 100 students and reading over 200 papers, 200 essay exams, and about 100 (since not everyone turns them in) exhibition journals, it is safe to predict that I will not be getting nearly as much writing done. C'est la vie.

Good Midterms in Czech Modernism!

My sabbatical being over and the school year underway, I admit I've seriously slacked off on blogging. Much has been happening, some of it definitely blog-worthy, but... well... we know how that goes.
This fall I'm teaching two courses, 1900-1945 and Czech Modernism. I'm pleased to say that the vast majority of students in both classes are doing very well and seem engaged in the course material. Nearly everyone has turned in all the required work so far and many students speak up in class.
Czech Modernism is a course I can only teach every few years, as while it is in one of my areas of specialization (as are my Surrealism course and my Women in Art course), our art history program is small. Every three years I rotate among a year of 18th- and 19th-century, a year of 20th century, and a year of American art; every spring I teach the second half of the intro survey; and I teach Women in Art every two years. So, as I am the only person teaching post-Baroque, my remaining courses need to shift about among the various other courses I have developed.
When I do teach Czech Modernism, students usually enroll in the class because it fits their schedule or because they like modernism or like me--not because they have an idea what Czech Modernism might be like, although I do include Czech modernist works in some of my other courses. Kupka is important in the development of abstraction and nonobjective art, Czech cubism enters into my discussion of cubism more generally, and of course the Prague surrealist group is part of what I teach when it comes to surrealism. However, students don't necessarily remember that they've already seen Czech art in other courses.
Consequently, students are unsure what to expect and how to connect Czech modernism to whatever they may already know. They can be alarmed by the names and worry how to choose a research topic that will have enough sources in English. (There is actually a lot published in English now, but not on every artist, and not always readily available.) Soon, however, they relax a bit and discover that they're drawn to much of the art and that Czech names can be kind of fun. After all, while names like Černý (Black) are fairly ordinary, names like Mrkvička (Little Carrot) are fun to hear and know the meaning of.
This semester, we also have the luck to have one student who has been to the Czech Republic and also an auditor who not only is very interested in her Czech heritage but is also fantastically generous, bringing pages from old Mucha and Lada art calendars to distribute and even books to give away to interested students. I'm discovering that while this isn't a language class, my students enjoy being greeted in Czech and find it neat to learn various Czech words. One of my students, in fact, has found that he can use ABBYY Finereader (which I merely use for OCR) to get rough translations of Czech texts. Without ABBYY and Google Translate and various other arcane tools he has found, I cannot imagine how he'd find enough information about the 19th-century Mánes family to write the paper that I was so reluctant to let him attempt. He has been kind enough to use his skills with machine translation to help some of the other students get a sense of Czech texts they have found, too.
In my upper-level exams I don't have students do IDs. In survey, yes, but after that I want them concentrating more on concepts, on understanding the different movements, thinking about the social context, etc., not stressing out over which year a work was made (although I really do want them clear on chronology and names). In the past I have done the Czech midterm as a take-home. This time I tried giving them the questions in advance and having them write in class without notes. This worked very well. While there were some cases of people not reviewing material that they really should have--I don't want to hear that Jan Hus was alive in 1620 for the Battle of White Mountain (even though his ideas were important then), or that Kupka was a leader of the Czech cubists--overall the class wrote very good exams that showed they had prepared appropriately. When I asked at the outset whether they wanted 15 minutes per question or 20, they clamored for 20 because they had "a lot to say!" It's gratifying when a class feels it has a lot to say on the material, especially when the subject matter is something that has required real effort and study.
On the whole, my students in both classes are keeping me pleased with life as a professor. That's important at a time when my university is having some serious problems.

Revising the Powerpoints

School starts in a month, so there's no shortage of work to do to prepare, even though technically I'm still on sabbatical. (And of course, sabbatical is all about work too, just not about teaching at one's home institution.) My main immediate teaching-related task is to get my two fall courses ready to go, although ideally I'd be getting the entire year's courses out of my hair. (Every year I hope to do that before school starts, and every year I fail, prompting a flurry of work at Christmas-time.)
Mind you, everything I'm teaching this coming year is a course I've already taught. In theory, that makes life easier. Well, and indeed it does, just not as much as I'd like. In teaching art history, we use Powerpoint or some similar presentation software such as OIV, having abandoned physical slides around the time I finished grad school. I have never taught a course using traditional slides, although I could have done so had I so chosen during my first years teaching.
The advantage of presentation software is that whatever you've created is available to re-use next time around. This is also, at times, a disadvantage. When I began teaching, I had no access to image databases such as ArtStor.org. Just as my students now often do, I went rummaging around on the internet in search of jpgs to download. In those days much less was available. Fewer museums had put any of their collections online. And, just as today, often the image is not properly labeled, is not of sufficient size to project large, may have poor color, may be cropped without that having been stated, and may even turn out to be somebody's proud copy of a favorite artist's painting. These problems meant that my early Powerpoints had a lot of imperfect images, a problem I compounded by not labeling the works very thoroughly.
So--before each semester starts, I try to go through the Powerpoints, many of which have had portions cannibalized from some other course because after all I might want to show major works by an artist in survey, in a 20th-century course, and in Women in Art--and see what might need fixing. Does the color look right? Is the label complete? Next thing I know, I'm spending hours searching through ArtStor for information that they may not have either, or may have wrong depending on who provided the image to them.
On labeling: not every art historian believes in labeling classroom images, but I sure do--most of my students have no idea how to spell a wide range of foreign names, and I'm not going to write every artist's name on the blackboard at the beginning of class as some of my professors used to. But beyond that, I've learned that my students--mostly aspiring artists--want to know the exact medium, and often how big the work is, and I'd like them to know where these works are. So I work to improve my labeling. And I'd believe ArtStor that a given work by Gabriele Münter is a color woodcut, except that I happen to know it's really a color linocut, which isn't the same thing. And when I see that Paula Modersohn-Becker painted various works on board or on cardboard, I get nervous about information that says oil on canvas, because do they actually know or are they just making an assumption?
This sort of thing is what I fret about when I still have a reasonable amount of time before the semester starts--if there's no time left, I say the hell with it, I'll have to try to fix some things as we go along. But something I have to deal with this semester, which has been an ongoing problem, is that the number of class sessions per week have changed from last time I taught these courses. Somehow this seems to happen to me constantly--that the amount of time per lecture shifts.
When I taught in grad school, we were on semesters, although sometimes I taught once a week, sometimes twice, and sometimes three times. When I got a job, we were on quarters and I taught twice a week. Before long, we switched to semesters, still twice a week but with a different amount of time. Next, my schedule began to rotate between twice a week and three times a week. That was kind of hellish for course prep (I like to divide topics by day, if not by week), so we introduced a schedule that involves teaching three days a week but doing a mix of two-day and one-day courses. I like this new schedule a lot, my colleague a bit less. It seems to work for the students. But it does mean that anything I taught three days a week needs reworking (i.e. everything I'm teaching this year), and the once-a-week course needs to be made less lecture-heavy.
Consequently, while friends who have been teaching longer than I have are astonished that I would need to do more than minor tweaks to my courses, I regret to say that, as usual, I have an unpleasant amount of reorganization to do before the semester starts.