What's that smell? Books, and coffee, and baked goods...

"Smell the aroma of literature."

I've been thinking about this graphic for some time -- a great sign for a venue like the Manic Bookstore Cafe.

A bunch of dill, usually tied with a string.

This past semester, teaching my upper level language students, I hit upon what turned out to be a brilliant essay topic. Building on a line from Pushkin's prologue to Ruslan and Liudmila, I asked the students to write an essay called "The Smells of Russia." Each student took a different approach, from drawing on our reading of Chekhov and talking about buttery pancakes, to remembering their own study abroad experiences and the foods they tasted in Russia, to googling "smells of Russia" and describing urine-soaked stairwells and unwashed masses in crowded subway cars. My favorite essay used the scent of dill. When you chop dill, as we did during our cooking day at the end of January (right in the midst of the polar vortex) the scent fills the room, and that day it evoked sunny summer salads for many of the students. For me, it brought back the winter of 1987 and my friend Irina, who would buy a puchok ukropa, a bunch of dill, each day at the Vasilevsky Island market so that she could make me a small pot of vegetarian soup when I arrived to visit her after my university classes were done.

The neat part about smells and scents in the Russian language is that you cannot actually smell them. That's not how the verbs work. You can "sense" them, "feel" them, even "hear" them. Crazy, eh? The scent can "stand" in the kitchen, perhaps even "waft" along the street. Trying to get the students to be less proactive and let the scents come to them was half of the (grammatical) fun.

Okay, so maybe it takes a certain kind of person to find that "fun." Nonetheless, thinking about the Manic Bookstore Cafe and its potential scents -- if it were a real, rather than a virtual place -- is also kind of fun. The classic scent, portrayed above, would be the scent of freshly brewed coffee. If I had been in manic baking mode, the cafe might smell of some lovely treat. Today, for example, despite the rainy weather, has been a lemony day. I baked a lemon cheesecake, and my daughter baked lemon bars, and I made fresh lemonade. (Now you're wishing you could stop by, aren't you?!)


Back in the day, we used to go to a cafe in Madison to talk about Derrida and be pretentious -- or to listen in while others were pretentious -- and we called it "Steep your Beret." I'm sure it doesn't smell the same now. We were in grad school in the late 80s, and all the coffee shops smelled of freshly ground coffee and cigarette smoke. People dressed in black, and looked depressed, and sat around talking and smoking and drinking their coffee (almost never cappuccinos in those days); taking notes and making outlines and avoiding their deadlines. It was a lifestyle.

But now even in Russia they've finally passed a law about smoking in buildings -- though I can't imagine how they'll enforce it, or how anyone will get any work done if they do. One year I spent some research time at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Russian Literature, in the library of the Pushkinskii kabinet, and all the interesting gossip and important mentoring happened in the stairwell, near the Maxim Gorky statue, while the senior scholars and their junior colleagues were taking a smoking break. Often I would go along just to listen in!

Of course, today's generation of writers and sketch artists often work in cafes -- I remember Jonathan Safran Foer told an audience at Wittenberg College a few years ago that he goes to his neighborhood cafe in Park Slope as if to an office. If it's Foer in your window seat, buying two cafe au laits in the course of a workday, I guess you don't complain, though some smaller cafe owners used to try to charge for electricity or at least require a drink an hour -- all this in the time before free wifi.

Language and literature at the BUW -- my favorite section!

In Warsaw last year I had to give up on getting any work done in the office the university supplied me, and I had a whole circuit of cafes I visited. Sometimes I worked in the library, of course, which had an awesome reading room and wifi I could access. But I also had other destinations -- the St. Honore french bakery and cafe on Krakowskie Przedmiesćie, where if I arrived before 9 I could have a cappuccino and a croissant for 5 złoty; near the library -- one of the Rue de Paris cafes or the cozy Czuly Barbarzyńca, recommended by a student; Kawiarnia Cava near my Polish lesson, where a cappuccino was 9 złoty but came with free local newspapers so I could practice my reading; Cafe Blikle, also on Nowy Świat, with a higher pricetag (14 zł). Wrzenie Świata at the Instytut Reportażu, also very near my Polish lesson and a great place to sit and think, read or write, or meet up with my husband, after my hour with Pani Paulina. Wrzenie Świata also has great meetings, author evenings, etc. -- next time I'm in Warsaw I'll work harder on my Polish and try to attend some of them. There were more cafes, some I've even written about, like Cafe Kafka and SAM and the Ministry of Coffee. A good life, following the cafe circuit. I'd love it to become a lifestyle...

What would the Manic Bookstore Cafe smell like? Surely espresso, and lemony baked goods, and books, new and old. I have an idea for a post about why the Manic Bookstore Cafe would never apply for a liquor license... A topic related to smells, of course, but a topic for another day.