Manic Bookstore Cafe

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 In the meantime, I've not been blogging at all and I was thinking of doing some more writing when I came across this unpublished post from autumn 2015.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...

Last week my students and I read three different scholars writing about Yury Tynianov, the formalist literary theorist, literary historian, and writer of historical anecdotes and biographical fiction. It felt a bit odd, because one of those scholars was me. I first explored Tynianov with my professor, Yury Konstantinovich Shcheglov, while I was still in graduate school. Prof. Shcheglov was fantastic -- a wonderfully intelligent and deeply compassionate and thoughtful man whose knowledge of everything from eighteenth century Russian poetry to contemporary American fiction amazed and amused me in the years I knew him. (More about that last later.) His erudition was legendary, as was his absentmindedness. Once I met him in Van Hise Hall, the languages building at Wisconsin. "Angela," he greeted me enthusiastically. "I'm so glad to see you! Do you know where the exit is?" We were on the fourth floor, a floor with glass doors opening out in several directions, i...