Manic Bookstore Cafe

Martin Handford's Waldo The other day I was visiting with some friends. Their two-year-old daughter kept busy while we chatted by examining a version of a "Where's Waldo" book. You know the type: a book of photos or pictures where there is one small element the viewer has to find, a balloon in this case, or in another case  the famous Waldo . Waldo is always there--you just have to scan the crowds, look behind tree trunks and in the windows of buildings, seek among hikers on crowded mountain trails. If you're focused enough and develop the right technique, if you train yourself and practice, you will always eventually find Waldo. The genre of this type of book guarantees success. Vladimir Nabokov famously talks about a similar phenomenon in the last paragraph of his memoir Speak, Memory : that gratifying and pleasurable moment when the thing unseen reveals itself. There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the har...

Here Chekhov looks positively cheerful, it seems to me! Chekhov gets a bum rap as being a pessimist. My favorite indictment is by Lev Shestov, a turn-of-the-20th-century philosopher, who accused the writer of "killing people's hopes and dreams." Ouch. Others have suggested that he's just depressing. I've been asked to speak on Chekhov in Finland in January (where, granted, it is very dark in the winter, and people perhaps do their best to avoid thinking depressing thoughts). I propose to lecture on the topic of Chekhov and cemeteries, and even the professor who invited me found the topic to be rather "sad." Nonetheless, I think a case can be made that Chekhov offers us ways to think about the world around us and our place in it which in fact uplift us and give us if not hope, then at least pause. (And the pause is one of Chekhov's most important dramatic tools in the plays. On that another time.) Costume sketch for Three Sisters (from ...

Lots of people feel they resemble the underground man, as this blog post attests. When I was in graduate school, my friend and I used to laugh about one of her high school classmates, a kind of black-wearing, photography-loving poseur who came to her h.s. graduation party, looked at her bookshelf, and declared: "Oh, Dostoevsky's Underground Man . I'm just like that character." An odd thing to declare, given that the "underground man" (whose name we never learn) is spiteful, vindictive, and lives in a dank basement room where he obsesses about his lack of social status. But maybe if you're a Goth-wannabe 17-year-old boy, it makes sense. In fact, of course, we are sometimes surprised at how spot on a literary description of a person or an experience can be. This week I taught Chekhov's classic short story "Let Me Sleep" about a 14-year-old nanny who works as a servant all day and desperately tries not to fall asleep all night while...

In graduate school I had a favorite New Yorker cartoon that got me through some of the tough times. Making lists is one of the great ways to organize one's life. And especially in a profession where you make your own choices as to how to allocate your working hours, lists are both a way of keeping track of time and obligations and a way to achieve satisfaction and get affirmation. I love lists -- I make them all the time. Inevitably, if I put on a pair of pants I haven't worn in a while, I will find an old list in the pocket. I have a fantasy about an art project where I collect lists -- my own, other people's -- and make a shellacked decoupage side table. But that project -- inspired by the mother of my best friend in graduate school, and perhaps conceived as long as twenty-five years ago -- is currently on the back burner. My list this morning looked like this: write blog post about list-making work on narrative for grant (edited volume) work on narrative for...

One of the things that is hardest to get used to when you lose someone, even temporarily -- whether a child to summer camp, a boyfriend you've broken up with -- or more permanently, a friend or parent who has died, is the hole it leaves in your life. Suddenly the time you were devoting to feeding the child, calling the parent, taking time with your friend or lover, is available just for you. In some cases this can be great -- when my children went off on their own this summer, the days became really long. When I go away for work, and I no longer need to do laundry, the dishes, the shopping, I suddenly can read for hours, or go for long walks, or attend the theater every night. But the important losses -- the loved one, whether to breakup or death -- create a void that looms from morning to night, and sometimes all night long. Time does not open up horizons, but instead can gape in empty and horrifying ways. Preparing my new courses for the fall, I've had several things...

Lately I've been doing some research into Russian food culture, which led me to think more about the issue of hospitality. The Russian word for hospitality is " gostepriimstvo ," literally "guest-reception." A synonym for this reminds me of what that translates to in real life: " khlebosol'stvo ," bread-and-salt. When you receive guests, what do you do with them? You feed them. This I can relate to -- I love to fill my own house with the smells of baking and cooking and then with people who will consume all that I produce. I've written about hospitality before . The traditional greeting for guests entering a Russian village involves a woman, preferably I imagine a comely maiden, holding an embroidered scarf between her arms with a loaf of bread and a cellar of salt perched atop. Not an everyday occurrence anymore, but I've experienced the ritual, and it is both lovely and a little weird. I've reproduced the ritual for my classes of...

I'm living in the city this month, so I have begun to experiment with Uber. In fact, my credit card company gave me two free rides for the month of June -- a promotion to recruit Uber riders. Given the controversy around Uber in France, I've been thinking about what the service means for U.S. cities. I have to say it's pretty convenient, and it's also a progressive-thinking way of calling a car and paying for a ride. Among other things, the drivers don't have to have all that cash in their vehicles, and the riders don't need to contemplate change, tipping, etc. These are features that cab companies should have thought of on their own long ago. Our first ride was with a "black car" driver from the Dominican Republic. We felt quite chic -- black-tinted windows, uniform and cap on the driver, very nice car. Of course, we did have to tell him how to get to the airport, and it cost about ten dollars more than a cab ride. It may be obvious that we only...

Yesterday evening we ran into a friend whom we haven't seen in a while. "You look fantastic!" I told her. "Really?" she replied -- and I thought she might dissolve into laughter. Apparently, the idea was utterly absurd to her. It turns out that her father died a week ago. Not entirely unexpected, she said, as he had been ill for some time. But somehow he kept rallying, so when it finally happened it was still a shock. I never met him, but I was able to go home and read about him that evening: he was eulogized in the New York Times. Weird issue to bond over. My mother died five weeks ago today. But as Anna pointed out, there is something about death that resembles other issues we've bonded over in the past. "When you are pregnant," she noted, "you get all kinds of clues that things will be changing. The baby kicks and moves, and you can't wait to meet it. Someone throws you a baby shower, you prepare a crib and buy a car seat, a...

Sign in Ljubljana Airport re: illegal items to transport It's summertime, right? So the living should be easy. Kenneth Gold on summer school In the U.S. we have gotten used to long summer breaks for children and even for teachers. Every year there are news stories linking the history of our school calendar to the needs of farm families, but last year PBS -- drawing on a 2002 book by historian Kenneth Gold --   argued that this is not true . In fact, taking the summer off is more about the urban middle and wealthy classes, who regularly fled the hot cities in summer for cooler climes -- the mountains, the lakeside, the beach. And at some point they began to ship their children off to summer sleep away camp. There are still schools today which lack air conditioning, and students swelter in those places in June and September. The nine-month school year is entrenched across much of the country, leaving classrooms empty and children unsupervised during the long summer mon...

Today we spent the afternoon at Eastern State Penitentiary . Haven't been there in years, in fact since before becoming parents. (First the children were too young to go, then they were old enough to enter according to the rules, but too impressionable...) And this amazing institution on the heights above downtown Philadelphia has changed. For those who don't know, Eastern State was the first  penitentiary and gave the meaning to the word. It was imagined and designed (as far back as 1829) as a place where criminals would be isolated and able to contemplate their offenses. In the process, they were to become penitent, and then leave the place ready to recommit to society. In those early days, there weren't a lot of tracking options -- no fingerprints, no electronic databases -- and so no one really knows how many people were able to reform.  What we do know is that initially the prisoners were given fairly short sentences and were left alone, with their bibl...

Death is funny. Not "ha-ha" funny, as we used to say when I was a kid, but funny odd, strange. I spend a lot of time thinking about death. That seems like a fairly obvious statement. After all, I teach Russian literature. When my now-sister-in-law heard that her brother was dating a Russian lit specialist, she famously asked: "Is she deep, or just depressed?" The answer is: neither. But even so, death is a big part of my life. Felix Lembersky, "Dusk: Matryona's House" Staraya Ladoga 1960-63 Writing my final exam bonus questions for my intro "Masterpieces of Russian Lit" course this spring -- questions about works we hadn't gotten to in class, but which I'd encouraged students to read anyway -- I began to wonder about my syllabus and the readings I choose. Here are the questions. Extra credit points:     1.      How and why does Mitya die in the story “Mitya’s Love”? (1+2)   2.      How and why does Matryona die in ...