Manic Bookstore Cafe

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Personal Sanctions. Second Reactions

On Thursday I fled Denver in the face of what was promising to be an epic snowstorm. (My AirBnB host, who grew up in Michigan, advised that Denver is quick to hit the panic button, but I didn't dare stick around to find out. I needed to be home before Monday!) In the plane, waiting for de-icing, I checked my e-mail and learned that I had been added to a so-called "stop-list" of U.S. citizens who are being personally sanctioned for our attitudes toward the Russian government and its internal and foreign affairs. It's not often that you end up on a list with the head of Lockheed Martin--certainly nothing I ever expected. But then, I also had never thought of myself as a Russophobe, and now that's the label that has been affixed to me by the Russian Federation. I had just been upgraded to first class--apparently not a lot of people were fleeing Denver that morning!--so I did what any Russophobe would do: I ordered a vodka from the flight attendant. An American vodka,

Cringeworthy? Really??

It's so sad. I've gotten my first reaction to my new book. Well, second reaction. My sweet husband was brought to tears reading the introduction (possibly because he remembered just how many drafts of each section of the book, and of all the sections left on the cutting room floor, that he had read, and read, and read before). But now I've heard from a potential reader that his Russian friend-in-exile (and more importantly that friend's teenage son) think the title is кринжовый. Ouch. That hurts. Why do we need Russian literature? Do we? My Polish friend wrote to encourage me when she saw my linked in post about the publication and assured me that SHE and all her friends still love Russian literature ... even and despite the fact that Russians sometimes misbehave. (Some Russians more than others, and sometimes not just misbehaving--the world's reaction to the murder of Alexey Navalny in prison is noteworthy and important. We need to hold those responsible in contem

Brotherly and Sisterly Love

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love. Or that's what it's called. Having just returned from a wonderful Slavic conference weekend, I can at least push the sisterhood. I cannot imagine how many conferences I have attended, and even in Philadelphia, and even at that same Center City Marriott. At one under-attended panel Friday, I was recalling a section I organized on Chernyshevsky (ten years ago? twenty?) for which a colleague from Moscow flew in specially. There were five of us on the panel and one in the audience. With forty simultaneous panels in any one time slot, it's inevitable that not every panel garners a crowd. But when I looked across a different room this weekend and caught the eye of a beloved colleague, Anne, who had been on that ill-fated Chernyshevsky panel, it came home to me: Philadelphia is the city of sisterly love. Anne is much more of a film scholar than a Chernyshevsky scholar (though her book that uses Nikolai Gavrilovich as a stepping off poi

Flyover Country

Years ago a friend of ours referred to Denver as "flyover country." It's a common epithet I think. The idea is that no one goes there, they just pass over it in airplanes going from one coast of the US to another. Since I live in Ohio, I can relate. Another of our friends asserts that when she used to drive from DC to the Twin Cities she always strove to drive through Ohio in the dark. I guess that at night she didn't have to experience the blandness. Of course, once we were here to visit, she often brought her family to spend the new year's holiday with us ;) We have been in Denver for the past few days, and it has felt like quite a significant place. First, the city itself has a lot to recommend it, and the hour we spent this morning at the Denver Museum of Art featured the best set of Native American collections I have seen anywhere. 19th and even 18th century artifacts--particularly handicrafts, like the most amazing moose hair embroidered tablecloth that app

Greener pastures

Last week I took what one of my friends called a "Hanseatic tour"--to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. The excuse was to take part in an amazing conference on post-socialist memory--and I was indulging in my own post-socialist memories, since the last time I went to Estonia it was Soviet, in the year 1989. I wanted to see what post-Soviet Tallinn was like and to hear in person what Russian-speakers, Ukrainian refugees, and local Estonian-speakers feel about the place in these difficult times. That part of the world feels like home to me--the quality of light, the air, the occasional mist or even sudden downpour. Being so close and yet so far from the cities of St. Petersburg and Vyborg, where I spent happy days and have so many friends and dear colleagues, was a sentimental journey for sure. Back in that same 1989 my father came to the Soviet Union, traveling on his first-ever passport, to visit me during my year studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute for Langua

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Here's another post I started a while ago, in the second week of the pandemic, March 2020. Not sure I understood at the time just how lonely this world-wide catastrophe would make many people, just how sad the spread of disease would be, just how many victims would die. The medical advances that led to the vaccines were quite amazing, really. Not at all a "miracle" but based on solid science. But the resistance to that science suggests that we are not living in a rational world. Nonetheless, running kept me sane. In March 2020 I started running more than usual -- five one morning, 2.7 one afternoon, a Saturday 4 miler. And I began to remember the words in the title of this post. Apparently I had no idea where they came from -- only now, with a bit of Wikipedia research, am I tempted to look up Alan Sillitoe's 1959 short story or its subsequent British New Wave film version. But running can be lonely, that is for sure, which must be why this phrase stuck with me. It s