Manic Bookstore Cafe

Lately I've been doing some research into Russian food culture, which led me to think more about the issue of hospitality. The Russian word for hospitality is " gostepriimstvo ," literally "guest-reception." A synonym for this reminds me of what that translates to in real life: " khlebosol'stvo ," bread-and-salt. When you receive guests, what do you do with them? You feed them. This I can relate to -- I love to fill my own house with the smells of baking and cooking and then with people who will consume all that I produce. I've written about hospitality before . The traditional greeting for guests entering a Russian village involves a woman, preferably I imagine a comely maiden, holding an embroidered scarf between her arms with a loaf of bread and a cellar of salt perched atop. Not an everyday occurrence anymore, but I've experienced the ritual, and it is both lovely and a little weird. I've reproduced the ritual for my classes of...

I'm living in the city this month, so I have begun to experiment with Uber. In fact, my credit card company gave me two free rides for the month of June -- a promotion to recruit Uber riders. Given the controversy around Uber in France, I've been thinking about what the service means for U.S. cities. I have to say it's pretty convenient, and it's also a progressive-thinking way of calling a car and paying for a ride. Among other things, the drivers don't have to have all that cash in their vehicles, and the riders don't need to contemplate change, tipping, etc. These are features that cab companies should have thought of on their own long ago. Our first ride was with a "black car" driver from the Dominican Republic. We felt quite chic -- black-tinted windows, uniform and cap on the driver, very nice car. Of course, we did have to tell him how to get to the airport, and it cost about ten dollars more than a cab ride. It may be obvious that we only...

Yesterday evening we ran into a friend whom we haven't seen in a while. "You look fantastic!" I told her. "Really?" she replied -- and I thought she might dissolve into laughter. Apparently, the idea was utterly absurd to her. It turns out that her father died a week ago. Not entirely unexpected, she said, as he had been ill for some time. But somehow he kept rallying, so when it finally happened it was still a shock. I never met him, but I was able to go home and read about him that evening: he was eulogized in the New York Times. Weird issue to bond over. My mother died five weeks ago today. But as Anna pointed out, there is something about death that resembles other issues we've bonded over in the past. "When you are pregnant," she noted, "you get all kinds of clues that things will be changing. The baby kicks and moves, and you can't wait to meet it. Someone throws you a baby shower, you prepare a crib and buy a car seat, a...

Sign in Ljubljana Airport re: illegal items to transport It's summertime, right? So the living should be easy. Kenneth Gold on summer school In the U.S. we have gotten used to long summer breaks for children and even for teachers. Every year there are news stories linking the history of our school calendar to the needs of farm families, but last year PBS -- drawing on a 2002 book by historian Kenneth Gold --   argued that this is not true . In fact, taking the summer off is more about the urban middle and wealthy classes, who regularly fled the hot cities in summer for cooler climes -- the mountains, the lakeside, the beach. And at some point they began to ship their children off to summer sleep away camp. There are still schools today which lack air conditioning, and students swelter in those places in June and September. The nine-month school year is entrenched across much of the country, leaving classrooms empty and children unsupervised during the long summer mon...

Today we spent the afternoon at Eastern State Penitentiary . Haven't been there in years, in fact since before becoming parents. (First the children were too young to go, then they were old enough to enter according to the rules, but too impressionable...) And this amazing institution on the heights above downtown Philadelphia has changed. For those who don't know, Eastern State was the first  penitentiary and gave the meaning to the word. It was imagined and designed (as far back as 1829) as a place where criminals would be isolated and able to contemplate their offenses. In the process, they were to become penitent, and then leave the place ready to recommit to society. In those early days, there weren't a lot of tracking options -- no fingerprints, no electronic databases -- and so no one really knows how many people were able to reform.  What we do know is that initially the prisoners were given fairly short sentences and were left alone, with their bibl...

Death is funny. Not "ha-ha" funny, as we used to say when I was a kid, but funny odd, strange. I spend a lot of time thinking about death. That seems like a fairly obvious statement. After all, I teach Russian literature. When my now-sister-in-law heard that her brother was dating a Russian lit specialist, she famously asked: "Is she deep, or just depressed?" The answer is: neither. But even so, death is a big part of my life. Felix Lembersky, "Dusk: Matryona's House" Staraya Ladoga 1960-63 Writing my final exam bonus questions for my intro "Masterpieces of Russian Lit" course this spring -- questions about works we hadn't gotten to in class, but which I'd encouraged students to read anyway -- I began to wonder about my syllabus and the readings I choose. Here are the questions. Extra credit points:     1.      How and why does Mitya die in the story “Mitya’s Love”? (1+2)   2.      How and why does Matryona die in ...

When my husband married me, he knew I was an international woman of mystery. I felt compelled to remind him of that this past month while he was herding our three teenaged children on his own, desperately trying to guide the flock safely through the perilous landscape of the last weeks of high school here. Yes, three -- we picked up an extra child in January, an independent and good-natured 17-year-old boy from Italy, our exchange student Andi. Our own two were also busy with their activities -- baseball, the championship season in track, a piano recital, a musical review, and of course schoolwork, and although we have loved hosting Andi, we may have underestimated the logistics of three children, especially for a (temporarily) single parent. (We did this three years ago with another exchange student, Tina from Thailand, though that was a little easier because the children were younger. If I remember correctly, I also left the country in May that year...) May is a month that req...