I’m watching an interview with a Nigerian man married to a Russian woman.

“We have a very happy marriage,” the man says. “What I learned about Russian women is that you do what they say. If you want to stay alive, that is.”

This is why it always entertains me to contemplate the sad delusion of men who marry Russian mail order brides, hoping to get a silent, submissive domestic slave. If anybody is going to be silent and submissive in that marriage, it will not be the Russian woman.

In case anybody is wondering, compared to Ukrainian women, Russian women are quite, passive wallflowers.

By “this” I mean the following comment by reader Lear:

People need to know they’re not alone, that their ideas are also shared by others. They need a place to share their voice and be listened to. Your Blog is that place and for that you’re the popular woman you always wanted to be!

I feel very good now.

I find the whole Niall Ferguson debacle***to be very funny because it demonstrates that the economists are still trying to resolve an issue that scholars of literature have settled decades ago. The biographical approach (meaning, an attempt to analyze an author’s contribution in terms of his or her biography) has long been discarded as useless, unproductive, and amateurish.

The reason why scholars of literature have abandoned the type of criticism where it was acceptable to say things like “Writer X had a miserable relationship with his mother and this colored all of his female characters” is because none of these assertions can be verified. We cannot possibly know anything about another person’s perception of his or her own life. All we can know is how we see that life and what it means to us.

Another problem with the biographical approach is that biographies are just as fictional as any novel. Somebody organized the events of a person’s life into a coherent narrative. In the process, a lot of material was of necessity edited out of the story. How can we know that the events which were not included into the story and that seemed unimportant to the biographer were not of the utmost importance to the person whose life-story is being narrated? If we are talking about an autobiography, how do we know that the author is not presenting us with a set of self-serving and self-aggrandizing lies?

This is why literary critics have long abandoned all attempts to psychoanalyze authors and explain their work in terms of their biographies.

Scholarly disciplines would do well by communicating with each other.

You can observe the intensity of the biographical debate among economists here.

***  “[I]n front of a group of more than 500 investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’s famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark.”

I love my readers because their level of brilliance never ceases to impress me. They keep coming up with really striking insights. See, for instance, blogger Z’s contribution to our recent discussion of the marketing strategies employed to dupe people into endless consumption of psychotropic drugs:

The narrative of revelation, how after the drug they had their first normal day ever, is taught. It fits the Christian conservative “I have been saved” narrative very well and it kind of sticks.

You don’t have to be actively religious to respond to this message. All you need is to have grown in an environment where the narrative of salvation is wide-spread. I didn’t recognize this message because I didn’t grow up in such an environment but Z saw it for what it is. And as we all know, nothing is more convincing than the familiar.

So the pharmaceutical companies have managed to create marketing campaigns that tap into the following major narratives:

1. The Christian narrative of revelation and salvation;

2. The essentialist narrative of being wired a certain way and having an inescapable biological way of existence that conditions one’s every action;

3. The progressive narrative of tolerance and inclusion where any identity (including the badly wired one) has to be celebrated unquestioningly.

Remember that good marketing campaigns do not try to manufacture needs. They identify the existing ones and tap into them. Anti-depressants do not cure depression but consumers don’t care because it isn’t the relief from depression they are trying to buy. It’s one (or two, or three) of the identity-building narratives listed above that they are purchasing. This is why they get so distraught and angry when you suggest that the pills are useless and even dangerous: they feel like you want  to undermine one (or two, or three) pillars of their identity.

The ridiculous drama of the bored: “Sometimes simply surviving is work. It’s hard work. And it really does make a difference in the world. Even if the world for that moment is small and no one else seems to notice.” And now imagine the horror of being the child of this hysteric who sees her problem-free, infantilized existence as a struggle for survival. Imagine having no escape from this posing. Imagine being forced to be the only source of food for her.

The smoking age in New York might go up to 21. Probably because the drinking age limit works so well. Old enough to drive but not old enough to smoke. Makes total sense. The reasoning behind this piece of arrant idiocy is the old belief held by the especially stupid and ignorant that people who start smoking early are more likely to get addicted. It is fascinating how it never occurs to people that correlation does not need to equal causation.

“Let us hope that the current Yale faculty is a dying breed, to be eviscerated by the free-flowing ideas that pulse across the Internet and cannot so easily be shut down.” Oh yes. Let’s hope for that, indeed. It could have been a great university but for the sad current state of affairs where tenured faculty members (who only teach a tiny minority of courses) are so preoccupied with preserving their status of living geniuses that they never say anything other than the most boring trivialities ever in the classroom. On the subject of the linked post, why would anybody have anything against a course on the Western Civilization?

“Jim Geddes, a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, is calling on liberal arts departments at the flagship campus at Boulder to hire more professors who are conservatives.” So this prick is advocating ideological discrimination in the hiring process? Will he be creating a list of approved opinions the successful candidates must possess to get hired? And more importantly, are the faculty members of this stupid pretense at a university rising in outrage and calling for this Stalinist to be ejected from campus? Or are they sitting impotently by?

The complete sentence game.

The worst way to start an academic essay in literature.

An interesting discussion on the completely ridiculous concept of “flipping lectures.” I’m beyond annoyed by people who know nothing about how a classroom is run but still create idiotic suggestions aimed at sneaking in MOOC strategies. Bleh.

And an intelligent albeit short response to the previous discussion.

And the post of the week: the relationship phrases that need to be thrown away.