Manic Bookstore Cafe

My neighbor has Parkinson's. He now spends all of his time in a hospital bed, with caregivers on site and on call. A former librarian, he is one of the kindest, gentlest people I know. With cats coming in and out of his room and hopping on the bed at will, he is settling into his hospice regime. But that doesn't mean he is in any way out of it. On Boxing Day I came by with my traditional offering--a coffee cake my mother used to bake for every major holiday. The recipe makes enough for two coffee cakes, and while of course one could simply cut the recipe in half, it's more fun (and neighborly) to make an extra. Tom looked fairly comfortable and was glad to see me. (As was his black cat, who appreciated the visit and got some nice pets and scritches while I was there.) We got to talking--he is looking for someone to come and read to him aloud. In the old days, we would see him walking to his job at the library, often balancing several books on his head just for fun. He's...

UPDATE: Evan Gershkovich, with other American and Russian political prisoners, was freed on August 1. As someone posted somewhere, we can rejoice that our people are out and the Russians have received murderers and spies in return. The optics of Evan's (and Alsu's) rushed trials to make sure to convict before the trade deal went through are bad... but then, what is good out of Russia these days? Trying not to despair. This good news is something anyway. Just over five years ago, I found myself with ten days on my hands in Europe. I had taken a group of 20+ students to Hungary and Poland, and I was due to participate in a conference in Croatia. There was a window. Any normal person would head straight to the beaches of the Dalmatian Coast. Instead, I went to Rome, to John Cabot's Guarini Institute , where we held a panel on the topic of  30 years after 1989 ... and then I went to Russia.  Musing on the former Soviet Union and my time there as a student--especially after wat...

A journalist was interviewing me Monday in Rome about my new book, Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature . It's fascinating to get new  questions, unexpected questions, and I should keep a log of them so that I'm prepared for the next talk or interview. Her question was: what is the one line from Russian literature that you like to quote over and over again? I found myself thinking back to graduate school, when we read all of Anton Chekhov in the original. The hapless heroine of Chekhov's play The Seagull  at one point in act IV says: "Я чайка ... нет ... не то." "I'm a seagull. No, that's not right." What does Nina mean? She goes on to assert "I am an actress," and it's true. [Spoiler alert] In the two years since the start of the play's action she has indeed become a provincial actress--after running away from her parents, engaging in an illicit love affair, having her lover's child who tragically perishes. No wonder she...

When I was preparing for a month-long study abroad trip to Hungary and Poland, taking first and second year college students to places they might not visit on their own, I decided to frame the course in terms of empire. For U.S. students even Austro-Hungary may be unknown, but in Budapest there are still physical and architectural traces of that empire, the Ottoman Empire and even the Roman empire. Heading to Warsaw gives me a chance to talk with them about partitioned Poland (1772 through 1918) and to discuss three empires: Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian. Plenty of fodder for conversation, especially in the context of today's European Union. What did it feel like to be a Polish subject in the Russian empire? A Jew in Austro-Hungary? A Ukrainian living in Warsaw or Budapest today? Aquincum, an ancient Roman city now  on the outskirts of Budapest, photo 2019 The framing is related to my university's general education program, where students are required to take courses...

On Thursday I fled Denver in the face of what was promising to be an epic snowstorm. (My AirBnB host, who grew up in Michigan, advised that Denver is quick to hit the panic button, but I didn't dare stick around to find out. I needed to be home before Monday!) In the plane, waiting for de-icing, I checked my e-mail and learned that I had been added to a so-called "stop-list" of U.S. citizens who are being personally sanctioned for our attitudes toward the Russian government and its internal and foreign affairs. It's not often that you end up on a list with the head of Lockheed Martin--certainly nothing I ever expected. But then, I also had never thought of myself as a Russophobe, and now that's the label that has been affixed to me by the Russian Federation. I had just been upgraded to first class--apparently not a lot of people were fleeing Denver that morning!--so I did what any Russophobe would do: I ordered a vodka from the flight attendant. An American vodka,...

It's so sad. I've gotten my first reaction to my new book. Well, second reaction. My sweet husband was brought to tears reading the introduction (possibly because he remembered just how many drafts of each section of the book, and of all the sections left on the cutting room floor, that he had read, and read, and read before). But now I've heard from a potential reader that his Russian friend-in-exile (and more importantly that friend's teenage son) think the title is кринжовый. Ouch. That hurts. Why do we need Russian literature? Do we? My Polish friend wrote to encourage me when she saw my linked in post about the publication and assured me that SHE and all her friends still love Russian literature ... even and despite the fact that Russians sometimes misbehave. (Some Russians more than others, and sometimes not just misbehaving--the world's reaction to the murder of Alexey Navalny in prison is noteworthy and important. We need to hold those responsible in contem...

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love.  Or that's what it's called. Having just returned from a wonderful Slavic conference weekend, I can at least push the sisterhood. I cannot imagine how many conferences I have attended, and even in Philadelphia, and even at that same Center City Marriott. At one under-attended panel Friday, I was recalling a section I organized on Chernyshevsky (ten years ago? twenty?) for which a colleague from Moscow flew in specially. There were five of us on the panel and one in the audience. With forty simultaneous panels in any one time slot, it's inevitable that not every panel garners a crowd. But when I looked across a different room this weekend and caught the eye of a beloved colleague, Anne, who had been on that ill-fated Chernyshevsky panel, it came home to me: Philadelphia is the city of sisterly love.  Anne is much more of a film scholar than a Chernyshevsky scholar (though her book that uses Nikolai Gavrilovich as a stepping off poi...

Years ago a friend of ours referred to Denver as "flyover country." It's a common epithet I think. The idea is that no one goes there, they just pass over it in airplanes going from one coast of the US to another. Since I live in Ohio, I can relate. Another of our friends asserts that when she used to drive from DC to the Twin Cities she always strove to drive through Ohio in the dark. I guess that at night she didn't have to experience the blandness. Of course, once we were here to visit, she often brought her family to spend the new year's holiday with us ;) We have been in Denver for the past few days, and it has felt like quite a significant place. First, the city itself has a lot to recommend it, and the hour we spent this morning at the Denver Museum of Art featured the best set of Native American collections I have seen anywhere. 19th and even 18th century artifacts--particularly handicrafts, like the most amazing moose hair embroidered tablecloth that app...

Last week I took what one of my friends called a "Hanseatic tour"--to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. The excuse was to take part in an amazing conference on post-socialist memory--and I was indulging in my own post-socialist memories, since the last time I went to Estonia it was Soviet, in the year 1989. I wanted to see what post-Soviet Tallinn was like and to hear in person what Russian-speakers, Ukrainian refugees, and local Estonian-speakers feel about the place in these difficult times.  That part of the world feels like home to me--the quality of light, the air, the occasional mist or even sudden downpour. Being so close and yet so far from the cities of St. Petersburg and Vyborg, where I spent happy days and have so many friends and dear colleagues, was a sentimental journey for sure.  Back in that same 1989 my father came to the Soviet Union, traveling on his first-ever passport, to visit me during my year studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute for Langua...

Here's another post I started a while ago, in the second week of the pandemic, March 2020. Not sure I understood at the time just how lonely this world-wide catastrophe would make many people, just how sad the spread of disease would be, just how many victims would die. The medical advances that led to the vaccines were quite amazing, really. Not at all a "miracle" but based on solid science. But the resistance to that science suggests that we are not living in a rational world. Nonetheless, running kept me sane.  In March 2020 I started running more than usual -- five one morning, 2.7 one afternoon, a Saturday 4 miler. And I began to remember the words in the title of this post. Apparently I had no idea where they came from -- only now, with a bit of Wikipedia research, am I tempted to look up Alan Sillitoe's 1959 short story or its subsequent British New Wave film version. But running can be lonely, that is for sure, which must be why this phrase stuck with me. It s...

On Monday we paid off our house. It seemed like the thing to do -- we love the idea of no mortgage payment, of not being in bed with the banks. I was prompted to take this admittedly loony step (we had a 3.25% mortgage and we are fortunate to have regular employment, so we have been able to afford our payments) by the pandemic. The crazy stock market during the pandemic got me thinking that money is ephemeral. I freaked out that some savings I had in the form of stock melted away in late February 2020, and I was surprised when they reemerged later. This stock boom just feels wrong given all the suffering of the past 18 months--and it also feels surreal, like it should probably not last. The "money" was in my account, but I recognized that it could be gone tomorrow. Better to put it into the house. In the meantime, I've not been blogging at all and I was thinking of doing some more writing when I came across this unpublished post from autumn 2015. Still pretty relevant, an...