#interwar Poland is my drug of choice

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Map of Warsaw including tram schedules circa 1920. When Stefania lived at Nowowiejska 36/4 during the 20s she would have taken #5 and #6

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When I'm thinking with/about a particular piece I try to immerse myself wholly--sights, sounds, ephemera, events, texts, contexts--in the milieu in which it arose. Currently this means 1924 Warsaw via Paris and Berlin + fin-de-siecle German-language art historians + looking at a lot of Expressionist art/flash-in-the-pan experimental periodicals/aesthetic movement manifestos & figuring out basic period/place logistics re: electricity, film, and cars. Also browsing exhibition cataloges and conducting a survey of the press. But most importantly listening to music in that strange transitional period between dance hall, opera, and big band genres where you have an operatic tenor singing a tango melody with brass accompaniment

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My accent-dar goes crazy, I am listening to Polish radio from the 1930s and woke up from a doze when Wiera Gran started singing because my brain heard her Polish and went "she was born in the Russian Empire and speaks Russian at home but like a Yiddish-inflected dialect of Russian from an area with a majority Jewish population" and I looked her up and my phonetic intuition was correct. Slay, Dwojra

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Who wants to see a map of intercity bus routes in Poland circa 1929

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Have been reading a lot at work and surprised myself again, in the sense that. If I split the project into parts it might actually be workable:

On the locus of the "I": cogito/reason, memory, Geist, psyche

On the invention of nation + public; philosophical geography; "civilization"; assimilation

On the conceptual, practical/legal, + discursive tensions between individual & collective a) self-determination, b) representation + expression, c) memory, d) psyche

On aesthetic empathy, Kunstwellen, "Empathy & Abstraction," Jung, early psychoanalysis, Bergsonian metaphysics & anthropology, ethnography, folklore, "authenticity" (circle back to "civilization," nation-building, etc.)

THE INTERWAR AESTHETIC/SOCIOPOLITICAL CONFLICT: REPRESENTATION VS. ABSTRACTION

WITHIN ABSTRACTION CAMP: Paris avant-garde (and Polish/French overlap); THE BIG TL;DR--HOW JUNG, BERGSON, VIENNA SECESSION ART CRITICS, IDEA OF NATIONAL GEIST (IMMUTABLE), IDEA OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS (PSYCHOANALYTIC SENSE), SYMBOLISM, "CIVILIZATION," AND FEAR OF ABSTRACTION AS TRANSCENDING REPRESENTATION'S INEVITABLE SIGNIFIERS OF DIFFERENCE (RACE SCIENCE IS ALSO HERE) COME TOGETHER: THE BELIEF THAT ABSTRACT ART CAN BETRAY IN ITS USE OF COLOR & FORM THE ARTIST'S SUBCONSCIOUS FOREIGNNESS, UNCIVILIZED NATURE, ETC., & THE BELIEF THAT ONE'S INDIVIDUAL (SUB)CONSCIOUS IS A) IMMUTABLE/ESSENTIAL, B) ETHNO-NATIONAL IN CHARACTER. This was expressed mostly about Jews

In Poland, during the interwar period, these aesthetic discourses re: abstract art corresponded to what were, imo, related debates: one about the Polish language (another variation on content vs. form, representation vs. abstraction, and How To Clock Jews & Ukrainians When They Speak Perfect Unaccented Polish), one about the "right to choose one's nationality," i.e., assimilation and self-determination

CODA: "MY OTHER HOMELAND IS THE IDEA OF EUROPE" - on Stefania, the postwar world order, the emergence of trauma theory, the psychoanalytic turn in historiography, and the contemporary prominence of memory studies, collective memory, collective consciousness, collective guilt, collective national affects, and the politics of commemoration - how "memory culture" can be seen as an encounter between the post-Enlightenment, fin-de-siecle Idea of Europe and the post-WWII, post-imperial Idea of Europe - the nation as collective subject, imbued with reason + will (self-determination), memory (the basis for identity, pro/contra Hume), consciousness in the psychoanalytic sense (experiences via historical process trauma, guilt, even return of the repressed). The staging of history as a psychoanalytic working-through of memory and the transformation of that staging into ritual commemoration become, by extension, constitutive of "civilization" (the nation as civilized person & LITERALLY analysand!!!!!!)

I have to learn German and French, unfortunately

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The first issue of Wiadomości Literackie was published on January 6th, 1924. This year, to commemorate the centennial, I'll be re-reading the archives and writing a series of mini-essays about interwar Poland's most notorious newspaper

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They finally digitized the 1921 Kraków census and fully 80% of adult women were named Maria. The other 20% were named Anna, maybe Stanisława if you're nasty

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Can only assume my neighbors were lighting fireworks early this morning to celebrate the 92nd anniversary of the Drugi Powszechny Spis Ludności, the second national census of the Druga Rzeczpospolita, conducted on 9 December 1931

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And finally here is a table of suicides in Kraków grouped by gender and month between 1899 and 1930. Poland will print a pamphlet about anything. Bohdan committed suicide in Warsaw but I still count him here for April 1929

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In 1910s Warsaw if you attempted suicide they printed it in the "suicide attempt" section of the crime blotter

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Billing Ignacy Jan Paderewski as a "famous Polish pianist" in 1923 is a nigh-unforgivable case of burying the lede lmfao

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Back on my bullshit

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In the 1930s Stefania publishes a brief write-up of a guest lecture at WWP about a woman's theory re: the functions of sound in film, how sound and image interact within the medium, etc., and laments that this work will not be published because it is sorely needed. Anyway based on her description this guest lecturer from Łódź independently invented the concept of diegetic sound, including its borrowings from narrative theory, over 50 years before Claudia Gorbman

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This is what I've been listening to in the mornings, by the way. Due to something is wrong with me

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My notebook at work looks exactly like this interwar "drunkard's map of Warsaw"

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Thank you 15-year-old Susan Sontag for the epigraph to my planned essay on Jelonka, Catholic conversion, literary self-reflexivity, radical pedagogies, and consecrated lay virgins among the Polish intelligentsia in the first half of the 20th century