Manic Bookstore Cafe

Here's another post I started a while ago, in the second week of the pandemic, March 2020. Not sure I understood at the time just how lonely this world-wide catastrophe would make many people, just how sad the spread of disease would be, just how many victims would die. The medical advances that led to the vaccines were quite amazing, really. Not at all a "miracle" but based on solid science. But the resistance to that science suggests that we are not living in a rational world. Nonetheless, running kept me sane.  In March 2020 I started running more than usual -- five one morning, 2.7 one afternoon, a Saturday 4 miler. And I began to remember the words in the title of this post. Apparently I had no idea where they came from -- only now, with a bit of Wikipedia research, am I tempted to look up Alan Sillitoe's 1959 short story or its subsequent British New Wave film version. But running can be lonely, that is for sure, which must be why this phrase stuck with me. It s...

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 In the meantime, I've not been blogging at all and I was thinking of doing some more writing when I came across this unpublished post from autumn 2015.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

My calendar tells me that today is the annual reception at my university to honor the Fulbright scholar exchange program and its grantees. Cancelled, of course. But I woke up thinking about the Fulbright exchange program --what it has given me and my family, the opportunities it has created for students and scholars all over the world. It was April 2012 when I learned I was under consideration for the Distinguished Slavic Scholar position at the University of Warsaw, and we spent spring semester 2013 in Poland. Since then I've been back to Poland several times in spring, and I meet up with former students who are doing amazing things, stop by the Polish Fulbright Commission office to see what's new, share a meal with a friend from the American Studies Center. She has had formative intellectual and cultural experiences while in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant, and she regularly interacts with visitors from the U.S. to Poland. We were grateful to the American Studies Center...

This morning on my run I saw a dead cat on the path. And that was not the saddest thing I saw. Tito's listening? Near the train station in Zagreb I love running in the city--any city--and have had many adventures this year. A couple of runs along the Tiber in Rome, where there were tented homeless encampments, but also construction workers preparing for festival season by building booths on the riverbank. A run in Zagreb early on a very hot morning, very few people about, featuring sober and silly public art projects. I took a long and beautiful--if slightly dusty--run in the countryside in Russia. I stopped to drink from a natural spring and was passed by a silent Russian man, dressed in a proper outfit for the country--high rubber boots, long pants, a jacket--and carrying a bunch of birch branches over his shoulder. I saw him ... and then I didn't. If he had been in a Russian film or novel he would have earned the sobriquet " vechnyi ded ," Eternal Grand...

Last week I spent two days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where my friend and colleague Catherine O'Neil leads a STARTALK program every summer. This government-supported language school runs four weeks, from 8:30-3:30 every day, and features fabulous language teachers from the Naval Academy. With a goal of 90% Russian language every day, the teachers have to be imaginative (after all, they don't take total beginners, but some of their students have had only a year of formal language training). They do exercises and readings, have conversations, play games and watch films (including Volodymyr Zelensky in Servant of the People , conveniently available on Netflix this summer). All in Russian. I also learned about their coffee break every morning, during which students have to go to the "cafe" and ask the grouchy post-Soviet barista (one of the fabulous instructors) for coffee, tea, or anything else they like. That seems brilliant--on the one hand the students...

It's been quite a rollercoaster of a spring semester. Russian Cuisine in Exile  is selling pretty well. It dawned on me to (Facebook) "friend" the surviving co-author, Alexander Genis, and then the son of the deceased co-author also friended me. Genis commented to me how ironic it felt that his (real) friends were still the main readers and purchasers of the book--this time Russians buying it for their own English-speaking friends. Konstantin Vail, who lives in New Jersey, wrote a super sweet thank you note to us for translating his father's book. Tom and I did a video interview in Boston at ASEEES, which the crack staff at Academic Studies Press edited up beautifully. I've also done a couple of interviews which will appear in print or have already online (see here , the U of Wisconsin CREECA interview with Larisa Doroshenko). And this morning--after spring semester, with my May term study abroad course starting in Budapest, Hungary tomorrow--I finally poste...

Check out the window, lower left. NOTE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN MID-DECEMBER AND REMAINED IN DRAFT FORM. TIME TO RELEASE IT AND GET BACK TO BLOGGING. Wednesday night we did our first public reading of Russian Cuisine in Exile in Milwaukee. Tom Feerick -- formerly my undergraduate student, now a second year grad student at Northwestern -- drove up from Evanston, while I drove over and up from my dad's house in Barrington. (On Thursday we met in Hyde Park for round two.)  In brief, translators on tour. What can I say? It was terrific fun. We were in "dialogue" with Joe Peschio, the brilliant and funny Russian prof at UW-Milwaukee who helped set up the event. Boswell Books is fantastic -- a large space with really well-curated offerings. I will make it a destination in future for stocking up for my own library and for gifts. The manager, Daniel, was gracious and sweet, and the audience settled right into comfy chairs and sofas to listen to us chat. As we were p...