czech stuff

I have written a book on Czech popular culture entitled "From Good King Wenceslas to the Good Soldier Svejk: A Dictionary of Czech Popular Culture". You can read a review from the Prague Post here. All published reviews can be found here. A brief interview about the book can be found here. You can purchase the book from Amazon or directly from CEU Press. 

I provide updates to the book at the Good King Wenceslas blog. You can also find a file with all new entries and tables here. Here is a file with tables about Slovakia. Pictures of most of the entries in the book can be found here.

I have another blog entitled Seldom Asked Questions about the Czech Republic. You can find a file with these questions and answers here.

I have also written a number of articles on Czech popular culture. I am currently trying to publish them as a book entitled Ideally Existing Communism: Popular Culture Before and After the Velvet Revolution. Here is the current version.

• Introduction

• Chapter 1: The other face of Czech film

• Chapter 2: Other worlds of globalization

• Chapter 3: Normalization and normal life in the films of Zdenek Sverak and Ladislav Smoljak

• Chapter 4: Dilemmas of collaboration

• Chapter 5: Old stars and new stars

• Cimrman, Czechness, and communism

• Chapter 6: Communism in post-communist film

• Chapter 7: The politics and anti-politics of nostalgia

• Chapter 8: Ideally existing communism

• Chapter 9: Communism: now and then

• Conclusion

You can find my translations of the Jara Cimrman Theater here

I am a fan of concrete or visual poetry (poetry that uses the typographical arrangement of words on the page to convey effects). Vaclav Havel produced many excellent concrete poems in a volume called Anticodes (Antikody). You can find my translation of these poems here. I will soon try to post more concrete poems by Jiri Kolar. The Sackner Archives has a great collection of concrete and visual poetry.

For Czech learners, here are some readings in Czech popular culture that I occasionally update.