Manic Bookstore Cafe

This time of year just seems to bring on nostalgia. Days getting darker, a chill and maybe something raw in the air, wet leaves, or mounds of dry ones that somehow reappear even after you rake them... Homecoming events proliferate -- at my alma maters, or for my kids, who have to figure out how to negotiate the soccer match and the dance -- even though I steadfastly ignore most games that take place on fields of any kind. And with the holidays approaching, a middle aged woman's thoughts turn to food. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, mostly because we always used to spend it with some of my favorite relatives. Plus the winter was coming, and we would often have frost in the morning of the big day. And we had lots of lovely rituals -- going to the apple orchard with my uncle to get cider for the afternoon (and hiding the maple sugar candy he would buy us from our parents); charades or skits or "three-men-on-a-couch" after Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother's. ...

Last Friday we had our annual "Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lecture in Russian Literature," the fifth in a series endowed by his widow Constance. I remember Professor Oulanoff, although he was already retired when I came to Ohio State. This lecturer, like others before her, managed to tie her own work to his by evoking Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains , the USSR State Prize winning 1944 novel about an orphaned boy who becomes an arctic pilot. (I remember reading excerpts of this novel in college with my beloved Russian teacher, Albina Nikolaevna. Someday I too will be able to link my work to that of Prof. Oulanoff, since Kaverin was Yury Tynianov's brother-in-law twice over [they married each other's sister] and I am writing about Tynianov.) Our lecturer was Andrea Lanoux of Connecticut College. Her work on Soviet and post-Soviet children's literature tries to isolate questions of the role of children's literature in development and ideological indoctrinati...

This morning I heard a remarkable keynote address by Tomislav Longinovic. For a year, my colleagues have been hosting a seminar entitled CrossRoads: Culture, Politics and Belief in the Balkans and South Asia. Much as I would have loved to attend every session, I somehow managed to go to, yes, two: the first keynote on India and one of the last, today. The experience was enhanced by the fact that I've known Toma for about a quarter century: he was hired at the University of Wisconsin about the time that Yugoslavia was becoming engulfed in the wars that tore it to pieces, and I was still in graduate school. But the warm embrace I got at the end of the talk was only half the reason I had a fabulous morning; the other half was the talk itself. "Words that Hide: Balkan Politics of Translation" was his title, and his aim was to try and tweak our understanding of the Balkans and of the unfortunate term "Balkanization," which, as he pointed out, is always negat...

I haven't been to Georgia in forever. But I have several scholars coming from Tbilisi to a symposium I've organized at Ohio State, and one of my favorite former students has been living there for some time, so it's on my mind. The symposium, because of a variety of complicated scheduling factors, is actually set for November 7 and 8. November 7, for those of you living in a truly post-Soviet world, is the anniversary of the October (Bolshevik) Revolution of 1917. We are thinking of another anniversary these days: this autumn marks 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A quarter of a century since the sphere of Soviet influence began to disintegrate. But in November 1988, 26 years ago, it was not self-evident that the Soviet system was failing. I was studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute of Language and Culture, on the south-west side of the city, and the group of Americans at our institute--under the leadership of our American professor--headed to Georgia in ...