The Mamdani Socialists who won their primaries yesterday in New York, meaning, of course, that they have won the seats, achieved their victories because of the overwhelming support in wealthy areas. These are people who feel bad for having servants, and they’re saying that electing somebody who looks like their servant to Congress is an appropriate compensation.

The victories of these DSA candidates are a gift to Republicans because whoever will be the leader of the Democrats in Congress will have to expend a lot of energy on controlling a runaway faction of lunatics. It’s also helpful that the socialist crazies will get a large platform and will be able to scare normie voters into running far away from the Dems.

These are excellent news, so we should celebrate.

I’m so sick I had to put the Tooth Fairy on my calendar for 40 minutes from now, because if I don’t, in 40 minutes I’m likely to forget. I’m re-reading Sophie Hanna’s The Other Woman’s House for the trillionth time. There is no moment in my life when I do not want to be re-reading this book, but it’s only when I’m completely felled by sickness that I have an excuse. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet and are looking for a perfect beach/poolside/sickbed/summer read, you can’t do any better.

I even have a fever, and I can’t remember the last time I had a fever. Ok, it’s a very tiny little fever, but still. The worst part is I could only do a single German exercise to keep the streak alive, and that without using my voice because I barely have any.

On the positive side, I discovered that if one is a scholar working on a project, one can arrange a visit to Rafael Chirbes’ house in Beniarbeig. You can even get permission to stay overnight, which I probably won’t seek because that would be very creepy. I don’t think I can swing it on my next trip to Spain because I already have many obligations for that trip. But the next next time I’m there, I’m totally going. The previous sentence is supposed to have the word “next” twice. I’m not sick enough to write things twice and not notice.

In one of her books, my daughter came across the word “psychosomatic” and asked me what it means. I’m in my last days as department chair, and I have a colleague who is persecuting me within an inch of my life with endless demands, complaints, and discrimination claims. It’s an enormous energy suck, so it’s no wonder that I woke up today feeling completely sick. My voice is almost gone. I have a terrible sore throat, and I feel like I was hit on the head by the large oil cistern.

“This”, I told Klara with the last poor remnants of my voice, “this is what psychosomatic means.”

I am a walking dictionary in more ways than one.

I have no idea why JD Vance is failing to notice that having his wife sit for these interviews is a bad idea. She doesn’t interview well. She doesn’t make a good impression. Her pregnancy is the perfect excuse to not have her participate. Not everybody needs to be a public figure. When people are going to vote in the primaries, they will vote for the candidate. We don’t need another pissy, pouty, Michelle Obama type inflicted onto the public discourse. We don’t need to hear from Usha at all.

I still can’t link to the tweet, but I listened to the clip, and it’s really bad.

The Russian propaganda channel is very obsessed with our reflecting pool:

It’s almost embarrassing how desperately the Russians have attached to the idea that something in the American capital might be imperfect. This is coming on the heels of Moscow going up in flames like a tinderbox.

This tweet offers the perfect encapsulation of Russians’ attitude to America. They are painfully, bitterly, woefully jealous.

For this research project, I spend hours and hours every day reading. This takes me back to when I was doing my undergrad in Montreal, and everything was dreamlike because all I did was read. For days now, I have felt very young and carefree.

Another similarity is that these books only exist on paper. I haven’t read so much on paper in years.

I’m also planning to watch some of the movies that meant a lot to Chirbes. He loved movies, but from what I’m seeing in the diaries, he was only interested in the films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This is perfect because later cinematic production of Spain and France, which are the two countries the writer watched movies from the most, would be intolerable to me. Hollywood movies I only like from the 1980s and maybe very early 1990s.

I was asked in the Q&A to comment on Anne Hathaway’s geriatric pregnancy. There has been an active discussion of this on social media, but I’m not sure there is much one can say about it. When women get pregnant, that’s wonderful. When babies are born, that’s also wonderful. However, unless a woman is extremely wealthy, it is crucial to remember that not only getting pregnant, but carrying to term, giving birth, recovering from the pregnancy, and caring for the child is enormously more difficult on the physical level at age 40 plus. Enormously more difficult. Every year of a woman’s age adds to these difficulties exponentially.

Of course, on the psychological level, if everything goes right, it can become enormously, and I repeat, enormously, easier to be a mother as you get older. This is not necessarily the case. What I say is predicated on consistent personal growth in a woman. But if that growth is there, being the mother of an infant, toddler, and preteen in your forties and fifties is the best thing ever.

So, yay for Anne Hathaway. I wish her a safe pregnancy and a joyful birth. I don’t particularly like her as an actress. I think she has no talent. But I want her baby to be born healthy and happy, as I want every baby to be born healthy and happy.

I also want to mention that people get fixated on the difficulties of getting pregnant in one’s forties, when getting pregnant is not remotely the hardest part of a geriatric pregnancy and birth. For me, the most demanding time was not even the high-high-risk pregnancy that I experienced with Klara, but not being physically able to care for my infant as I wanted to in the first months. For those of us who are not Hollywood starlets and don’t have an army of servants, this can be the hardest part of a geriatric birth.

I didn’t know any of this when I nicknamed her Aloha Bimbo but it was clear that this is the kind of woman who would completely debase herself for some dude. People kept saying that she was a Russian spy, but she’s not a spy. She’s the female equivalent of pussy-whipped. Is there a word for that? A woman whose main goal in life is to be noticed by the trashiest representative of the male species, on whom she incomprehensibly fixates. This is completely beyond politics. It’s a psycho-sexual phenomenon that is not political in nature.

Chirbes also thought that Vargas Llosa’s best novel was The War of the End of the World. I feel deeply vindicated.

Curiously, Chirbes was not nearly as widely read in contemporary Spanish literature as I am. He read a lot of European modernists, such as Musil and Döblin, writers that I have never managed to force myself to read beyond the first dozen pages. In contemporary Spanish literature, he really admired Alvaro Pombo’s Contra natura that I discussed recently in this blog. He read a lot of Antonio Muñoz Molina, and his opinions on this writer were identical to mine.

Just so that people know for how much longer I will be torturing them with Riafeil Chirbes’ diaries, I have read and copiously annotated the first two volumes. I have one more volume left. It’s a thousand pages long. I’m right now at the point where Chirbes is finishing his novel Crematorio, which will finally bring him massive recognition within his own country. I love that novel and have published extensively about it. Being able to read a day-to-day account of how the novel was created gives me an almost voyeuristic kind of pleasure.

At the local water park, Klara was standing in line for an activity where you have to cross the pool by stepping on little inflated pontoons while holding yourself up with a cable rope. I stood next to her to make company.

A very young lifeguard thought that I was queuing up for the activity. To warn me that my age was inappropriate, he said, “I am sorry, ma’am. I don’t want to presume, and I apologize in advance, but this is for ages 16 and under only.” I congratulated the young man on his exceptional politeness and tact with which he delivered the not-unwelcome message that I was out of my teens.

It’s very encouraging to see this kind of politeness in someone so young. I would have done a much worse job at his age. American children and teenagers are the most polite I’ve seen anywhere.