“So when are you going to write a novel?” my psychoanalyst asks.

“I’m not!” I exclaim, alarmed by the question. “Never.”

“I can feel a novel brewing in there,” the analyst says.

“No,” I say. “I’d rather die than be one of THOSE people.”

“Novelists?” he asks. “What have you got against novelists?”

“No, I mean THOSE PEOPLE. The ones who entertain the childish dreams of being rich and famous rather than recognize that they hate their lives.”

“I’m not convinced,” the analyst says, looking very unconvinced. “I’m pretty sure that one day I will see your name at the bookstore, in the fiction section.”

Of course, now I’m wondering if the analyst is trying to suggest that I’m a really talented liar. I have a huge issue with thinking that everybody suspects me of dishonesty, and he knows it. It takes everything I have not to run after each colleague who casually asks, “Coming from class?” and yell, “Yes, yes, I’ve been to class, I swear, I have 23 people who can prove it, and here are the homeworks I collected, and here is my class plan, so yes, I’ve been to class, and how dare you suspect otherwise, you mean, nasty evildoer?!”

But what else can this insistence that I can write novels mean other than suggesting that I lie really well?

Whenever a national identity is formulated along the lines of “We are more spiritual than everybody else,” that should be translated as, “There won’t be any food, so just get used to it.”

Franco did that back in the 1940s and Russians keep doing that since they became a nation.

OK, why are all of the 8 candidates for the Family Friendly Leave committee women? Our male faculty members also tend to have families.

I’m always disturbed by ghettoization.

People have started to receive my book in the mail. One of them says it’s

a most elegant and intelligent book, as one would expect from its elegant and intelligent author.

Another recipient says ,

WOW, it’s very real. :)))) . . . Congratulations – it’s a beautiful REAL book!

A reminder to those who want to purchase a copy of the REAL book for $15: please send an email to Dra. Carmen Urioste <carmen.urioste@me.com> expressing your interest in doing so. The money doesn’t go to me, in case anybody is wondering, but to the noble cause of supporting our professional association of Hispanists that actually does an amazing job of mentoring beginning academics in our field.

 

The contractor says, “I also bought a house recently. I could only buy it because it stands on top of an old cemetery so it was cheaper. I keep finding headstones. Under my driveway, for instance, there are two people buried. And judging by the headstones, most of the people died while they were in their twenties. This is why I think they must be slaves. Also because the headstones are very simple, obviously very cheap. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything, but let me tell you, weird things keep happening in that house.”

On this blog, we recently discussed somebody’s opinion that nobody is publishing novels about the working classes any longer. This isn’t at all true, however. Such novels are there to be found and if people are not finding them, I’m guessing they aren’t looking very hard. For instance, there is a recent novel by Kelly Braffet called Save Yourself. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a good, solid novel that I greatly enjoyed reading.

The novel offers a very interesting contrast between the lives of its working class protagonists, with their crappy jobs and hopeless existences and the ridiculous overwrought dramas of their upper-middle class neighbors. In a brilliant move, Braffet doesn’t tell us how well-off the upper-middle class protagonists are. We only discover this when a working class protagonist observes them at a restaurant where she works and notices an enormous contrast between their reality and hers. This complete unawareness of the rich neurotics of how different their lives are from those of the working poor is the novel’s strongest point. What I really liked about the novel is that this contrast isn’t overworked. You see it if you want to see it, but the author doesn’t push it in your face. 

This is precisely what distinguishes literature from entertainment. A writer of an actual work of literature isn’t worried that readers wouldn’t get the point. She lets them approach the work of art on their own terms and take what they will from this.

The writing is surprisingly good, very simple and clear. The author seems to have an MFA but even this didn’t make her write in a pretentious, prettified way so many of the MFA graduates do. I definitely recommend the book, and I’m very glad I discovered this promising writer among the mountains of crappy novels American authors publish every year.

So I decided to find out what compels some Ukrainians to support Russia’s invasion of their own country and discussed this issue with some distant relatives on Facebook.

What I discovered is that these relatives are convinced that Russia is fighting a war against the United States. The relatives try to avoid the word “Ukraine” as much as possible and react very aggressively when I tell them that there are no NATO troops in Eastern Ukraine.

“But Russia has the right to defend itself against the NATO!” they keep repeating.

They also exhibit an intense and very racialized hatred of Obama who, in their opinion, has orchestrated the NATO’s invasion of Ukraine to improve the US’s economy. I didn’t manage to comprehend this particular argument in spite of people explaining it to me at length. It has something to do with Obama trying to stave off inflation in the US by means of his invasion of Ukraine.