George M. Cummins, III, is a retired associate professor of Slavic languages and cultures at Tulane University, where he taught from 1972-2010 and served as Department Chair of Germanic and Slavic from1998-2007. His specialties were Russian and Czech language and literatures and undergraduate teaching. In recent years he has been working on Czech and Austrian music and cultural history. He is the author of Mahler Re-Composed (2011) and is now writing about the Czech composer Leos Janacek. He lives and works in New Orleans and has three children, a son Kit, who is professor of inorganic chemistry at M.I.T., a daughter Liv, a singer-songwriter in New York, and a son George IV, who is a student in New Orleans. He runs along the Mississippi river levee in New Orleans, follows his home-town Chicago Cubs, and travels to his favorite destinations in the Czech Republic - Brno, Prague, and recently Hukvaldy. In my last year of undergraduate teaching (2009-2010) I wrote a blog for my...