Chirbes wrote some fascinating stuff about my other most favorite Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo. Critics fixated on the gossipy stuff Chirbes said about the other writer, but that is the least interesting thing about his comments. What’s fascinating to me is Chirbes’s analysis of himself and Goytisolo as being at the opposite sides of the spectrum in what concerns national literature.

Goytisolo was anti-nationalist to an almost comical extent. As such, he wanted to make the point that the national iterary canon of Spain did not exist. The only worthwhile Spanish authors, in his opinion, were some obscure dude with an English name and himself.

Chirbes was the exact opposite. He loved the national literature and studied it with profound attention his whole life.

This attitude was reflected in their lifestyles. Goytisolo left Spain and resided outside of the country for decades. Chirbes lived in a small farmhouse inside the Spanish countryside and never considered moving overseas. Both writers were gay, but Chirbes’s gayness was enormously more honest than Goytisolo’s. To give a single example, Goytisolo wrote a two-volume autobiography explaining why he never wanted to have children and how crucial this desire not to have children was to his political beliefs. Yes, he was a raging commie, but then who in Spanish literature isn’t? But that’s not the point. The point is that the writer ends this deeply child-free autobiography by informing the reader that late in life he did become a father. Don’t get me wrong, Goytisolo is an artistic genius. But an honest person he was not.

These are both mega-talented authors, and it’s interesting how one of them understood the other.

In the meantime, Germany is tying itself into knots to counteract the effects of mass migration that was supposed to save the country’s economy:

Germany Mandates First-Day Doctor Notes to Curb Corporate Sick Leave

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is abolishing telephone-based sick leave to combat high corporate absenteeism. Workers must now provide a medical certificate on their first day of illness, a measure aimed at reversing the country’s economic and competitive disadvantages.

Merz cited severe economic pressures, pointing to elevated rates of absenteeism across the corporate sector.

https://clashreport.com/world/articles/germany-mandates-first-day-doctor-notes-to-curb-corporate-sick-leave-lehm8p06tdq

First, the Chancellor informed his countrymen that they would have to delay retirement age. Now he wants to police corporate sick leave. I can’t even imagine what would be happening had the German economy not been saved by the mass-migration wave of 2015 that brought all of those highly skilled and extremely hard-working migrants into the country.

I was a lonely kid, tragically shy, deeply unpopular. I invented all sorts of strategies in first, second, and third grade so that it wouldn’t be quite as noticeable at recess how alone and ignored I was. I understand that this mom has good intentions, but she should absolutely stop. Children need to spend time with each other without parents or teachers managing their relationships. The lonely girl will grow up and get over it, or not, but that will be completely up to her.

Children at play or in the midst of devising their sociability strategies need to be left in peace. When they are at school, this and not math problems or exercise sheets or music lessons is the most important thing that they do. Unless somebody is getting physically beaten, which clearly is not happening in the situation in the tweet, the adults should just buzz off. They are too far removed in time to remember what it is that their children are doing. They are projecting their problems from today onto the behavior of the children. For example, the woman in this post is, for some reason, extremely uncertain of her value as a parent, and she engages in these little competitive outbursts on social media. It’s clear that that’s what it is because the language she chooses is uncomfortable and unnatural. “Scum of the Earth… because they are not inclusive.” Two completely different speech registers are clashing uncomfortably. The strength of the emotion breaks against the official slogan-like vocabulary.

Leaving that aside, efforts to manage one’s children’s relationships with other children is a mistake. If you want to show that approaching a lonely, shy person is a great thing to do, lead by example. Start approaching. There are tons of adults, including on the playground, who would love to make a friend, but they don’t know how to do that.

One of my aunts was desperate to raise her son to be a reader. She would spend all summer barking at him to read, but she herself never picked up a book. My mother, on the other hand, thought that I read too much and wanted me to learn to play the piano instead. I had to wear shoes two sizes too small my whole childhood, but my mother found money to pay for seven years of piano lessons. Today, when my cousin and I are both middle-aged, guess who doesn’t read and who doesn’t play the piano.

It’s brilliant and I want something like this for my diabetic needles.

The reason why the footage is old is that Russians raped the Texan dude to death.

The 4 Russian soldiers who did it were sentenced to jail time and then immediately released and sent to the front lines again.

The story is very symbolic of all pro-Russian Americans. Russians don’t care if you are on their side. If you are American, they hate you.

Why was she annoyed, though? I wouldn’t be annoyed. I would be mega happy for my husband getting some positive reinforcement at a doctor’s visit.

People are way too touchy about things. The dude is in his late 70s! He should enjoy all the compliments he can get at this stage in life.

The husband of the new department chair is a judge. Meaning, he is very busy at work. But he came early to campus this morning and found somebody to unlock the department for him to leave a bouquet of flowers and a sheaf of patriotic balloons to mark his wife’s first day as department chair. He is a Republican, and she is Venezuelan hence the patriotic balloons.

These people have been married for over 25 years and have three children. And they still have such a romantic, beautiful marriage. I’m not saying that this is because they are Republicans, of course. My closest friend at the department is far left and also in an extremely loving marriage with a bunch of happy children. He lights up like a Christmas tree whenever anybody mentions his wife, even in passing.

It’s beautiful. It makes me so happy to observe these wonderful, profound, long-lasting marriages.

Matt Walshes of the past were completely right about the Hart-Celler Act, Reagan’s amnesty, and every amnesty in between and after. So I’m not sure what point this dude is trying to make.

People often forget that in order to argue productively against somebody’s position, it first makes sense to find out what that position is. This is a standard problem in the debates between the left and the right. The right is very familiar with the left’s position because it’s the official one, transmitted through every public institution for decades. People on the Left, and I was one of them until roughly 2016, are utterly unfamiliar with the narratives of the Right because it’s necessary to go digging in order actually to find them. I was stunned when I actually discovered what it is that right-wingers believe. It bore no resemblance to what I had been told by the left that the right believed.

I highly recommend to the well-meaning people on the left, who are the absolute majority, because these are good, kind, well-meaning people, not to assume that you know. Ask questions, have conversations, and you will discover things that you were never told even existed.

A reader’s life often travels along confusing paths. In Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, which was the very first novel I read in German, the characters discuss Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck”. Of course, I had to re-read “The Wild Duck” in order better to understand Bernhard’s novel. After doing that, I started wondering if other authors had been inspired by the play in their own work. This is how I came across the Norwegian writer Dag Solstad and his novel Shyness and Dignity.

It is an excellent novel. The main character is a 53-year-old high school teacher of Norwegian literature named Elias Rukla. At the beginning of the novel, he tries to share with his students his original new reading of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck.” The students are completely indifferent to his efforts, and Rukla ends up having a massive freak out right in front of the students. As he walks home after this debacle, the teacher thinks about the events in his life that led him to this point.

Shyness and Dignity is a short novel. It’s one of those breathless, very European narratives that offer a glimpse into the mind of an everyday neurotic. If you’re into this kind of writing and like to follow all of the little psychological clues that the author drops throughout the novel, then the seemingly mundane ending of the book will strike you as absolutely explosive. If, however, you do not believe that the daily life of everyday people is the most fascinating thing imaginable, then you will find the novel boring. The book starts slow as the readers get to experience the tedium of a failed class in Norwegian literature that Elias Rukla is teaching, but after that the novel really picks up the pace and becomes downright addictive.

I loved Shyness and Dignity. It is hard to say based on only one novel, but it is possible that I have found a new favorite writer.

THEO VON: “Was there anybody who was immune to COVID-19?”

DR. MCCULLOUGH: “There’s one adult group. You’re going to laugh.”

[Theo Von listens closely for the reveal]

DR. MCCULLOUGH: “Smokers… They got very mild cases. And they don’t get long COVID.”

THEO VON: “Why?”

MCCULLOUGH: “Because smokers maintain a level of nicotine in the bloodstream… Smoking blocks the spike protein. It’s amazing. I thought smokers were going to go down.”

It’s true. I am extremely fortunate in that I was following all of the research very closely at the time. When I got Covid and things started getting really bad, instead of going to the hospital to be put on a ventilator and probably not survive, I headed over to the nearest gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes. The symptoms started clearing up so fast that it was like a miracle.

This was all known to scientists pretty early in the pandemic. I could cure myself because I read the research.