Manic Bookstore Cafe

So this week President Vladimir Putin of Russia was quoted in the New York Times as complaining about "boorishness." Photo credit: Mauri Ratilainen/ European Pressphoto Agency for the NYT This was not the  most  noteworthy quote in the NYT this week (I am striving not to use profanity since reading about J.D. Vance's Mamaw in his  Hillbilly Elegy , so I won't repeat the other quote). It was, however, named the " Quotation of the Day ." Not many Americans use the word "boorishness." In fact, I may never have heard it spoken aloud in my entire life. Nonetheless, as often happens when reading translations, I had to back-translate and realized immediately what Putin must have said in Russian. I checked on the Russian internet, and I was right: Putin called the new sanctions being imposed on Russia by the U.S. Senate "boorishness and cynicism" -- or khamstvo i tsinizm . The word khamstvo , or boorishness, seems like the kind of t...

"Smell the aroma of literature." I've been thinking about this graphic for some time -- a great sign for a venue like the Manic Bookstore Cafe. A bunch of dill, usually tied with a string. This past semester, teaching my upper level language students, I hit upon what turned out to be a brilliant essay topic. Building on a line from Pushkin's prologue to Ruslan and Liudmila , I asked the students to write an essay called "The Smells of Russia." Each student took a different approach, from drawing on our reading of Chekhov and talking about buttery pancakes, to remembering their own study abroad experiences and the foods they tasted in Russia, to googling "smells of Russia" and describing urine-soaked stairwells and unwashed masses in crowded subway cars. My favorite essay used the scent of dill. When you chop dill, as we did during our cooking day at the end of January (right in the midst of the polar vortex) the scent fills the room, a...