Manic Bookstore Cafe

Wednesday evening I had a rather surreal experience. I went to see Rimas Tuminas's brilliant play of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , staged at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow. But it was one of those filmed plays that American movie theaters have taken to showing (I wrote about a National Theatre Live production here ). Which is great. I was thrilled to see it -- I'm going to Russia in a few weeks, but I won't manage to get to the theater, and theatrical offerings where I live are not on this level. I've heard a lot about Tuminas, but since I haven't really been in Moscow much in years, I've never seen one of his productions. And it was terrific. Tuminas takes the classic Russian novel-in-verse, the centerpiece, really, of much of Russian literature, and turns it into a compelling spectacle. Tchaikovsky's opera of  Eugene Onegin  is well-known, of course, and there have been numerous attempts to render the novel in film, but this staged version is the ...

It's back to school season in the U.S. Elementary and high school students in my part of the country have been in the classroom for a month now, and most colleges have started their fall term as well. But in the late summer I began encouraging people to ask me when I head back to the classroom -- because the answer is so satisfying. "August, 2017," I say. Sabbaticals are a perk of academic life, and a real treat. The idea is two-fold. Originally, I imagine, a sabbatical was granted in order that faculty members would have a chance to relax and recharge. The wording is not accidental. At most institutions, faculty are eligible for sabbaticals every seven years, which someone must have decided was the stretch of time after which renewal was required. We do work hard (though perhaps not harder than other people!), and especially when a professor has been teaching the same courses term after term, a chance to step away from the classroom, to read up on new developments...