Bout of Books 5 - Friday Update

  As much as I wanted to continue reading today, my main reading that wasn't for teaching happened between 4:30 and 5:30 am, when I was reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook, before I could finally fall asleep again, and between 11 and midnight when I got back to it before bed. In this section of the book, our hero, Vladimir is organizing a literary magazine/Ponzi scheme in the ex-pat community of "Prava"  - the hipster scene in Prague of the 1990s.

   I can't believe it took me so long to read Shteyngart. For years, I bypassed paperback copies of this book on the shelves of my favorite Brooklyn used bookstores, never believing I had time to read it.  It was then, as a brand-new college professor that I most ascetically only read things that were related to work, whether for my own book-in-progress, or in order to teach classes in unfamiliar subjects that I was scheduled to teach with only weeks to go before the opening of a semester.  Now that I'm reading it, I would say it's both exactly the kind of book I like, and that it is in many ways close to my own personal history. Shteyngart's only a little bit younger than I am, so many of the cultural references of the 1990s are familiar. I knew some people who went to Prague and traveled to Eastern Europe during this era - the band I sang for in college played a song written by one of these folks, with the title "the Bucharest Blues." (chorus: "I got the Bucharest Blues/ I gotta get outta this place") During my assistant professor years, I briefly dated a scientist from Azerbaijan who'd moved to LA with his family shortly after the fall of the USSR  When he talked about his childhood, he told me he'd once aspired to be a "Soviet Man," passionately memorizing and reciting passages from Mayakovsky. The way he described it made it sound like an adolescent rite of passage, in the way that many in the US describe feverish teen-aged reading of another all-too-American Russian emigré, Ayn Rand. And, of course, as a CUNY professor, I had so many students from the former USSR. In my first two years living in Brooklyn, I taught developmental English classes in Brighton Beach, often called "Little Odessa"   Finally, it was after seeing them open for Manu Chao on Central Park's Summerstage in 2001, that I became a devotee of the "gypsy punk" Ukrainian band, Gogol Bordello, although despite years of hearing about it, I never made it to see Hutz DJ at the Bulgarian Bar.

 I finally gave myself the pleasure of reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook by making it part of work. That is, incorporated a section on US- Eastern European connections into my syllabus for American Studies this year, as part of my syllabus is meant to introduce students to theories of transnational American Studies through fiction. It seemed worthwhile to spend some time on the former USSR, given the current keen interest in our President's relationship with Russia. We'll be reading a short story by Molly Antopol, a chapter set in Shteyngart's Prava, and watching the movie made by a CUNY grad, Darko Lungulov called Here and There, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival years ago. I imagine that this urban cosmopolitanism will be as foreign to my current students in the suburban US South as Garrison Keillor once was to my immigrant students in New York City, one of whom once asked if "born-again" Christians believed in reincarnation.




I did get some other scattered reading done.  While cooking dinner, I listened to Crosbie Wells' letters to Alistair Lauderback in The Luminaries.  My official (non-teaching) reading of the day was Caldeira's City of Walls. I woke up late and got about ten pages in before I realized I had to do a ton of things on the computer because I was working from home. Among the things I had to do were read a couple of journal articles that I've assigned my students for next week, both about broader effects on communities created by policing and incarceration. I wish I had found a place on the syllabus this semester for City of Walls - there are so many connections with this week's assignments in particular. One of these days, I'll teach this class again, I hope, and then I can find a place for Caldeira in a section on policing/incarceration in the Americas beyond the U.S. That way, I could also include some of the great work being done in surveillance studies in Canada. It may be slow progress, however, as it seems the semester is going like this: