Manic Bookstore Cafe

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love.  Or that's what it's called. Having just returned from a wonderful Slavic conference weekend, I can at least push the sisterhood. I cannot imagine how many conferences I have attended, and even in Philadelphia, and even at that same Center City Marriott. At one under-attended panel Friday, I was recalling a section I organized on Chernyshevsky (ten years ago? twenty?) for which a colleague from Moscow flew in specially. There were five of us on the panel and one in the audience. With forty simultaneous panels in any one time slot, it's inevitable that not every panel garners a crowd. But when I looked across a different room this weekend and caught the eye of a beloved colleague, Anne, who had been on that ill-fated Chernyshevsky panel, it came home to me: Philadelphia is the city of sisterly love.  Anne is much more of a film scholar than a Chernyshevsky scholar (though her book that uses Nikolai Gavrilovich as a stepping off poi...

Years ago a friend of ours referred to Denver as "flyover country." It's a common epithet I think. The idea is that no one goes there, they just pass over it in airplanes going from one coast of the US to another. Since I live in Ohio, I can relate. Another of our friends asserts that when she used to drive from DC to the Twin Cities she always strove to drive through Ohio in the dark. I guess that at night she didn't have to experience the blandness. Of course, once we were here to visit, she often brought her family to spend the new year's holiday with us ;) We have been in Denver for the past few days, and it has felt like quite a significant place. First, the city itself has a lot to recommend it, and the hour we spent this morning at the Denver Museum of Art featured the best set of Native American collections I have seen anywhere. 19th and even 18th century artifacts--particularly handicrafts, like the most amazing moose hair embroidered tablecloth that app...

Last week I took what one of my friends called a "Hanseatic tour"--to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. The excuse was to take part in an amazing conference on post-socialist memory--and I was indulging in my own post-socialist memories, since the last time I went to Estonia it was Soviet, in the year 1989. I wanted to see what post-Soviet Tallinn was like and to hear in person what Russian-speakers, Ukrainian refugees, and local Estonian-speakers feel about the place in these difficult times.  That part of the world feels like home to me--the quality of light, the air, the occasional mist or even sudden downpour. Being so close and yet so far from the cities of St. Petersburg and Vyborg, where I spent happy days and have so many friends and dear colleagues, was a sentimental journey for sure.  Back in that same 1989 my father came to the Soviet Union, traveling on his first-ever passport, to visit me during my year studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute for Langua...

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...