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...

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...