"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...
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.