Manic Bookstore Cafe

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...

Being affiliated with a major university -- and knowing the right people who point you to cool events -- has its advantages. Yesterday I attended the Ohio State Theatre Research Institute lecture featuring Pamela Howard. This woman -- a "director, scenographer, visual theatre artist and educator" -- was amazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, generous, intelligent, talented. What can I say -- I was honored to be in her presence. Many people were there to find out about her current work-in-progress, a production based on Charlotte Salomon's graphic memoirs Life? or Theatre?  If you haven't heard of her, Charlotte Salomon was a 23-year-old Jewish refugee sheltering with her grandparents in Vichy France in 1940 when she learned of a strange fate that surely awaited her -- she learned that eight members of her family in the matrilineal line had committed suicide, a fact that had been hidden from her when her mother threw herself out a window in 1926 and only came to ligh...