Manic Bookstore Cafe

"Snow is falling today, almost wet snow..." St. Petersburg in December is dark, very dark. It can be hard to get out of bed in the morning. Setting the alarm for 9, I hit snooze -- once, twice, then drag myself into the kitchen. Tea and breakfast is followed by a trip to the cafe and one cappuccino, two cappuccinos... This afternoon I am wandering around the city, and I picked a very Dostoevsky-like day for it. The above quote, of course, is from his Notes from Underground , and today the mood of the so-called "underground man," his frustrations, self-judgement, oppression, is perfectly understandable. Moika canal, with #12 in the center of the photo After a visit to the new galleries of the Hermitage in the General Headquarters Building -- lofty ceilings, gorgeous views from the fourth floor of Palace Square and the Alexander Column -- I began to walk the embankments. Moika -- home to the last apartment of Alexander Pushkin -- the Griboedov Canal, where ...

My students this term have again been doing some of their own research, doing what I call "filling in the gaps" between the authors and texts we've been reading and exploring together. "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" Some presentations have been more successful than others, but one last week on Futurism struck me as particularly timely. We've been emphasizing drama this semester, in particular performance and performativity, and so the stage was set for the Futurists and their 1912 manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." For the students, the idea that one scholar has called "aesthetic disobedience" (in regards to Pussy Riot performances in recent years) was rather strange: "Why did anyone care how they dressed? Why couldn't they wear wooden spoons in their lapels if they wanted to? Why was a yellow shirt so shocking? What other color shirts were being made and worn, and why were they somehow less shockin...