“Mommy, our teacher is very grim. She keeps telling us how white people used to hurt black people. She has many stories like that.”
“What do you do when she tells the stories?”
“We just sit there being white.”
Human Food
The cat likes no human food except for parm crisps. As I found out to my detriment as I sat holding a parm crisp in my hand. She snuck up on me and extracted it in one fluid motion. I’ve tried her on all sorts of things. Pieces of meat, chicken, sour cream, potato peels.
What? Ukrainian cats are often into potato peels.
Nothing interested her, though, except for these parm crisps.
I’m not sure how to interpret this finding.
By the way, we are doing a great job slimming her down. She came to us obese but we are slowly getting her to a healthier weight. We took her in for claw trimming today, and the vet was very impressed by our progress.
No, I don’t trim claws and I resent the suggestion that I could engage in such an act. I almost caught a heart attack stuffing her into the carrier today.
A Failed Proposal
Yesterday the Provost came to the Faculty Senate and, for once, she had a great suggestion. We have an online system for curriculum and program changes. It works at a glacial pace. People wait for years for their paperwork to move through the system. Finally, the university decided to ditch the clunky thing and introduce another system next Fall.
In the meantime, the Provost proposed that we form a committee that will work in the summer and move all of the proposals that are currently stuck in the system at an accelerated pace. She even proposed to pay extra money to people who would do this work. I perked up because imagine how great that would be? All the multi-year backlog cleared so that we can start over with a clean slate in the new academic year. Plus, people would get paid to do this work over the summer. What’s not to like? I have a proposal that has languished in the system since 2023. There are 13 (I kid you not) levels of review in there, and my proposal is at level 9 currently.
The Provost needs the Faculty Senate to approve the expedited procedure for this to happen. But guess what? People shouted down this idea. It’s too fast, it’s too unexpected, we need to “have conversations” about it. Most people aren’t on contract in the summer, so there won’t be any conversations. The proposals will not go through.
“I want to make this easier for you guys,” the Provost said bleakly. “I found money to pay the summer stipends. Can’t we agree to do it just this once?”
But no, we can’t.
The entire time I’ve worked here, people have been complaining about the slowpoke system that is supposed to process these proposals. Finally, we get a chance to get it all done. And … they refuse.
A Mysterious Change
In January of 2021, a prospective student wrote to me to ask which of our courses she could take remotely. I gave her a list. She decided not to apply.
Today she wrote to me with the same question about online courses. I replied that there aren’t any. The prospective student is incensed.
“I don’t understand what changed,” she wrote. “Why was it possible back then but not now?”
Yes, it’s a mystery. What could have possibly changed since January of 2021?
Success for Restore
Wow, that’s incredible:
And great success for Republicans in Virginia:
Things are looking up.
Ramsey’s Advice
Ramsey is right. These people shouldn’t get married. There’s no love in the relationship. On either side there’s no love. She bitches about him to strangers, he humiliates her about money. These are people in love with their egos who have no feeling for each other.
Alabama Republicans
Proud to be a Republican:
Curtis Yarvin once said that the right cares about power the way a wine snob cares about alcohol but the left cares about power the way an alcoholic cares about alcohol.
Republicans in Alabama showed us how to care.
Resentful Mothers
They should learn German and listen to Thomas Bernhard in the original. I’ve done an hour of listening, and I’m attending the Faculty Senate in a state of luminous bliss. I don’t even know what people are ranting about because I’m sitting in an armchair in a Viennese salon in the 1980s.
People should occupy their minds, is what I’m saying. It doesn’t have to be German. Any fresh intellectual endeavor works great.
Emotional Agitation
OK, so I started listening to the German version of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, and it sounds very different. The German voice actor is reading the story in a much more emotional way. Have you heard Hitler’s speeches? The recording of the novel is not that intense but still much more intense than the English version.
The novel is titled Holzfällen. Eine Erregung in German. The English translator cut out the “eine Erregung” part, and the English actor had no way of knowing that emotional agitation is present even in the title of the novel.
I love listening to it in German. Now I wonder what it sounds in Spanish, if a Spanish audiobook exists.
Book Notes: Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian post-war writer, is the main literary inspiration of my favorite Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. He’s a genius but his books are of the kind that you either absolutely detest or abjectly love. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but I myself am in the camp of abject worshippers.
Woodcutters is a very typical Bernhardian novel. It’s an inner monologue of a very fussy, neurotic writer who spent 20+ years in London and comes back to Austria for a brief visit. The narrative is purposefully repetitive. The writer uses the expression “as I sat in the wing chair” over a hundred times. He’s attending an artistic dinner in the house of a rich artsy couple he used to know back in the 1950s. The writer hates everybody at the dinner and his inner monologue is delightfully venomous and gossipy. If you are not into inner monologues of repetitive neurotics, you won’t like the book. But to me it’s a “shoot it straight into my veins” type of enjoyment. I listened to an Audible version, and the voice actor is perfect for this role. If you like Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion, read Woodcutters. I will now listen to it in German while the memory of the novel is fresh in my mind.
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