N’s Birthday

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

It’s N’s birthday today, and he shared this Tomahawk steak with Klara:

He’ll keep eating it for the next two days because it is so huge.

I had fish with bok choy. I discovered bok choy late in life, and now I’m obsessed with it:

N said that, since it’s his birthday, he wanted to try doing something unusual, such as talking. He told us a very long and detailed story about people who died while trying to scale Mount Everest.

The semester is over, and I’m free to concentrate on my reading and writing. This was a busy semester and it’s a great relief it’s finally done. I’m not going to be in a classroom until January 2027. I still owe a few meetings but I’m bringing my research there and ignoring everybody else completely.

The Death of Teaching

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

We have the same push at our university, and it’s a very bad idea:

The University System of Georgia (USG) implemented a policy in 2025 that requires syllabi to be publicly posted onto university websites before registration…

USG says the change “aims to ensure that all students have access to the critical information necessary for informed course selection and successful academic planning.” … UGA professors are required to have their syllabi available before registration opens for fall courses, a change from the past two semesters in which they were allowed to wait until one week before courses began.

We are told the exact same thing in a way that is so identical, it’s weird. “Students need it! It’s critical information! Successful planning!”

I’m opposed but almost nobody else is so the measure will be introduced.

Here’s why I am opposed.

There are two types of professors. There are those who teach the exact same course for decades, recycling it endlessly and repeating the exact same thing over and over again. For these professors it will be extremely easy to provide their syllabi 6 months before classes start, which is what “before registration” means.

There are also professors who come up with new material, new course structure, new readings, and new lectures all the time. Professors like me. I’ve never taught the same course in an identical way. This measure exists for one reason: to get rid of innovative, interesting teaching. It exists to shut up people like me. We will be locked into one standard syllabus that will be vetted and posted and it will reappear automatically on the website every semester. If you want to do something new or innovative, you’ll open yourself up to complaints for not following the pre-approved, pre-posted class program.

What I really despise is how it’s justified by supposedly being in the interests of students.

Same Old Idea

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Yes, “nationalism is bad”, what a fresh, complex idea. We have only heard it and observed its consequences for the past 40 years. Let us strain our brains to their utmost capacity to process this brilliant insight.

Is it humanly possible to be any more vapid? My cat is capable of greater insight than these “all-round intellectuals.”

The Great American Novel of the Working Class

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Richard Russo’s writing is neatly divided into two different eras by year 2002. When he was a struggling writer trying to eke out a living from a patchwork of sad teaching gigs, he was a genius. He wrote about the destruction of the American working class throughout the 1990s. His novels Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls are extraordinary. They are about male friendships, the crumbling down of working class families, and the consequences of the death of American manufacturing.

Then Russo became successful. His writing started to bring in good money, and he no longer belonged to the working class that had inspired his best writing. The writer became a wealthy, clueless twerp, and he now writes for smug, supercilious leftists who sit in their Cape Cod mansions and pout at the “racist-sexist” plebs.

In short, read the 1990s Russo but beware of everything he wrote this century.

I know we’re talking about novels but I also want to recommend Russo’s memoir titled Elsewhere. It tells the story of how the writer was completely controlled and endlessly persecuted by his freakish mother. His entire life was blighted by the terrible woman, and it is not surprising that he became far-left in his later life. The overbearing Mommy, who followed him around like a pitbull his entire life, simply ate his masculinity. Russo is from the kind of a broken home where the controlling mother chases away the father and turns the son into a pseudo-husband for herself. The memoir depicts this not-infrequent pathology in a clear and poignant way.

America lost a truly great author when Russo went woke. I never abandon hope, so I plough through every new book that he publishes. To say that they are terrible is the mother of all understatements. Russo tries to massage the characters from his talented novels of the 1990s into the Procrustean bed of critical race and gender theories. The characters in his woke-era sequels become cardboard cutouts and nothing of what they do or say makes sense if you remember how they were and what they did in the preceding novels.

Clueless Candidate

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Is it humanly possible to have worse political instincts than Vivek?

How can it even occur to him to say something like this?

Against Ethnic Enclaves

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

We have several new families with young children at church. Families with six, five children, it’s so beautiful, it brings me to tears. But what I want to talk about is something different.

One of the new girls at church is the daughter of Ukrainian parents. Klara and this girl glomped on to each other like nothing I’ve ever seen. Klara doesn’t grant her friendship easily and takes a long time to warm up to people. She’s extremely choosy in her attachments. But with this girl the attraction was instant and intense. By culture, these girls are completely American. Neither speaks a word of Ukrainian or has much interest in her parents’ origins. They love pizza and cheeseburgers, play with labubus, recite American play rhymes, and can spend hours debating the origins of the 6-7 routine. But there is something that goes deeper than culture. It’s genetics, the call of the blood. Human beings are not solely made out of words. We are physical beings before we are anything else. These two girls fixated on each other because they have a shared biological link.

I experience something similar with my Ukrainian Fulbrighter. Politically, we are the polar opposites of each other. My Ukrainian is weaker than my English or Spanish, so speaking to her requires an effort. We belong to different generations, and our life experience is radically different. Still, the way I feel around her is unlike anything I feel around colleagues with whom I have much more in common in pretty much every way.

Ethnic enclaves are not a good idea, is what I’m saying. It’s not about intentions or conscious decisions. There are powerful biological forces inside of each of us. It flatters our egos to pretend that this is not the case and that we are entirely the product of our own desire. But there are many things in all of us that we cannot control. God created the universe with Logos. But we are not God. We don’t create ourselves, or at least not entirely.

Conservative Books

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

People are listing books that turned them conservative:

I, however, read (not all but some) of these books after I became a conservative. Zygmunt Bauman, a Marxist, turned me conservative. Poor dude would have been horrified. I’m sure, though, that if he were 30 years younger and could witness the complete neoliberalization of the Left, he would have been one of us.

Bauman’s Liquid Love is an ode to stability and permanence in personal attachments. There’s nothing more conservative than that.

Those Who Read

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

This number is about the same among college professors.

Who Is Governing?

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

At the exact same time as cars are being turned into surveillance devices in the US, it happens in the EU:

Who is really governing us if such synchronicity is in evidence?

Also, the rhetoric of deep, unresolvable conflicts between EU countries and the US that we’ve been hearing recently seems to exist in order to conceal the synchronicity of the establishment of a surveillance state.

Screen Time

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

I don’t know from research but my 10-year-old finishes a book every two days, knows large chunks of the Bible by heart, composes poetry, writes and draws graphic novels, and the other day she spent 5 hours cleaning and decorating her room and creating beautiful little installations for her book case. I have no idea how giving her a smartphone would have improved her life, so this fellow can stick his research up his.

The only criterion of doing something with your kid is how this will be helpful to the kid. “It’s not as bad as some people say” is a terrible operating principle. Show me how it’s good and makes her life better because my method is bringing excellent results and I see no reason to abandon it.