For my big birthday celebration on Saturday, N and Klara bought a jar of my favorite Bubbies pickles. They will be making a surprise brunch for me. The pickles are an inspired choice because I don’t cate what else is served as long as I can have those pickles.
Updates Needed
I have to talk about the political news tomorrow but it’s the end of the academic year and I’m completely out of touch. I spent all day today battling Legal to let the sweet widow come to the award ceremony. I won. My definition of “including but not limited to” finally prevailed. But I have no idea what’s happening in the world.
Please update me, people. Please, pretty please. I’m a rescuer of sweet old widows, and I deserve help.
Not Equivalent
High schools love offering college credit for their courses, and I’m now often asked to evaluate course syllabi in foreign languages to see if they are equivalent to any of our courses. It’s an enormous waste of time because I’m yet to see a single high school syllabus in Spanish 101 that would actually teach Spanish. Zero of the syllabi I get sent mention grammar. Instead, they require endless presentations on identity and “cultural” issues.
I keep explaining to the person who supervises these equivalencies for our university that there’s nothing I can do. If students can’t conjugate verbs in the present tense, I can’t say that they completed Spanish 101, no matter how many hours they spend prattling about identities in English in their high school class.
“At the end of this course, students will be able to maintain a conversation in the target language,” these syllabi claim. But it’s not true. You can’t maintain a conversation if you don’t know how to conjugate verbs, how to do do noun-adjective agreement or how to use object pronouns.
Everybody wants to teach ideology because it’s easy and nobody wants to do the hard work of making sure students can produce a simple grammatically correct sentence.
Tell Me It’s Nice
This reminded me of an old Soviet joke.
A man comes to a doctor, whips out his penis and plonks it on the doctor’s desk.
“Does it hurt?” the doctor asks.
“Nope,” says the patient.
“Trouble urinating?”
“Nope.”
“Erectile issues?”
“Nope “
“Then what?” the doctor asks, losing patience.
“I just need you to tell me it’s nice,” the patient explains.
Your Own People
The problem with Skyler and Walt is that they are from different social classes. He can’t love her because she’s too primitive for him. Walt is in love with Gretchen who is from his social class and closer to him in IQ.
There’s no love without admiration. You can’t love somebody you despise. Skyler does talking cushions. Look at Walt’s face in the scene with the talking cushions. And look at him in the scenes with Gretchen. After 20 years of marriage and two kids, you don’t react with great intensity to a discussion of who dumped whom with a random girlfriend from your youth unless your marriage is a sham.
Skyler is not bad. She’s just a vulgar person with unrefined sensibilities. You can’t have emotional closeness with somebody who’s much more primitive than you. The famous birthday hand job scene shows this perfectly. For Skyler, the thinking is, “husband has birthday. He deserves some form of sexual gratification. I provide it. Box ticked. Moving on.” That for people who are more complex sex is not simple mechanical release doesn’t occur to her. Similarly, it doesn’t occur to her that Walt might not want to be saved by a former girlfriend or a disabled teenage son. She sees everything mechanistically. “We need money. Here’s money. We take money. Problem solved. Moving on.” When she discovers Walt’s drug dealing, again, we see mechanistic thinking so common in primitive people. “Husband bad. Eject husband from life. Problem solved. Move on.” She is honestly confused that the teenage son doesn’t accept the ejection of the father he loves from his life. She doesn’t understand that other people don’t function like that.
The dumb confusion on Skyler’s face every time she is around people who are more complex is very typical. We can’t look at everything in terms of individuals. This isn’t about good individuals versus bad individuals. It’s a very well-written show about what happens when you don’t live your own life with your own people.
Workplace Accomplishment
We are so understaffed that I got an approval today for my absence request of March 5th. I wonder what would happen if the request weren’t approved. I was, indeed, absent. What am I supposed to do? Go back in my time machine and not be absent on March 5?
I have no idea who the poor bugger is that the administration hoodwinked into approving these old requests. But imagine that person’s work day. The feeling of accomplishment must be overwhelming. Think about that miserable bastard if you feel like you didn’t get a lot done today.
The Preacher of Choice
Folks, I highly recommend Tucker Carlson’s today’s show. He invited a dude who is a CEO of a biotech company that makes designer babies, and it’s a lesson in neoliberal thinking. The designer baby dude has “choice” as every other word in every sentence. To every ethical objection that Tucker advances, the dude responds “It’s ok if it’s a choice.”
This is such an impoverished, inane philosophy that I understand why morons love it.
Zero Lessons
The president of the American Comparative Literature Association sent a letter today informing academics that their role is to “explain to students, parents, administrators, and the general public issues like the … weaponization of white, male, hetero privilege.”
Zero lessons learned.
Protected: A Sensitive Dude
Hot Literati
This is absolute crap. Literary taste is honed by decades of intense reading. My book reviews are great because I’ve been reading longer than these kids have been alive. You can’t “reshape criticism” when you are a total noob. You should sit quietly, read, and learn.
I read the article that this image headlines, and do you want to guess how these “hot literati” reshape criticism? They claim to do it by reviewing “sex-worker adjacent literature” and “things that reveal lineages our readers might not have seen before.” These young people are too inexperienced to notice how incredibly stale this posturing is. “I’m going to be all cool and unconventional by writing about hookers” is neither new nor unconventional. It’s been done a trillion times, and it’s always deeply boring.
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