Today, my husband and I are celebrating our 17th wedding anniversary. One downside to being married is that I no longer can eat as much raw garlic as I want unless my husband agrees to eat just as much at the same time.
I have discovered no other downside to the married state.
One thing that I observed in New York that I still don’t fully understand is that African Americans there are very different from the African Americans here in the Midwest. Our African Americans are nice, smiley, chatty, and sociable. You can strike up a conversation anywhere. People are open and receptive.
In New York, I continued engaging with African Americans like I do around here, but it didn’t go over well at all. Whenever I would open with “Oh, what a cute puppy. What is his name?” or “I love your outfit. It’s so pretty,” people would give me a stink eye. The guy with the puppy literally shrank back from me like I was threatening to attack him with a samurai sword.
I went to the New York Macy’s, which is a store that always employs black women. Our local Macy’s is a feast of sociability. The black store attendants are always, “Oh, hello, Miss Clarissa. These are such pretty outfits that you found. They’re going to look so amazing on you.” And I respond with, “You look pretty fantastic yourself, Miss Tenisha. Look at those shoes. They are a dream.”
At the New York Macy’s store, I wandered around the store floor for 15 minutes, trying to find the checkout counter where the store attendant would not look like she hated the very concept of human contact.
Before you tell me that all New Yorkers are like that, it’s not true. Hispanics in New York are exactly the same as Hispanics everywhere. I don’t know about white people because I didn’t come across any in New York who were not tourists. There was one very chatty white Uber driver, but he was Ukrainian.
People are hating this article, but it points to something very important.
Not only the Greeks, of course, but everybody in the past had a completely different type of consciousness than we do. The title of the article is formulated in this shocking way on purpose because, yes, ancient Greeks did have some form of an inner life, but it was so different from ours that it doesn’t even make sense to call it by the same name.
The reason why I keep saying this is that it makes absolutely no sense to judge historic figures and events by our standards today. I wasn’t interested in watching the movie The Odyssey, not because of the woke casting, but because I see no point in transposing the Reddit mentality of today onto the events that happened millennia earlier.
And this is not only true for historic distance but also for the linguistic. Language provides the building blocks for our inner architecture. One tiny example is the word order in a sentence. Some languages have an extremely rigid word order, while others have a loose one. Curiously, you can find the most well-ordered societies among those who speak languages with the most rigid sentence structure.
Every day, I look up what cancer my mother died of and then immediately forget its name. This is obviously psychological. It’s getting so I’m about to ask my AI agent to remember it for me and then bring it up on demand.
Yesterday, I located it after three Google searches, and today I don’t remember what it is yet again.
My father died of advanced myeloid leukemia. It’s three words instead of one, and I remember it easily. Plus, he died a few days after the diagnosis. Still, that I remember.
Tucker Carlson says correctly that Ronald Reagan was an early proponent of legalizing abortion in his state. He also says incorrectly that Reagan signed a large immigration amnesty because he was tired of being called a racist in the press. The reason for both of Reagan’s positions is the same: he was a neoliberal. In fact, he was one of the earliest major politicians who were neoliberals.
Neoliberals are, of course, a variety of liberals. This is why the next big American neoliberal after Reagan was Bill Clinton, who shipped American manufacturing to China. Neoliberals do not like the concept of a country because this concept constrains freedom of movement.
It isn’t the freedom of human beings, however, that interests neoliberals. They will lock you down in a flash if it serves their only real purpose, which is to ensure freedom of movement for flows of money. The direction in which they want the money to be moving is upwards. If it serves that goal to drag large groups of the population across national borders or, alternatively, lock people down in their homes, they will gladly do both.
I asked AI to create a color-coded chart of my readings since 2008. I haven’t digitized the rest of the list, so it had to be past 18 years only. There is a couple of small errors in writers’ names but overall I think it’s really cool:
AI ponderously concluded that it doesn’t look like I’m a casual reader but more of a professional literary critic.
In WB Maxwell’s Mrs Thompson (1911), there’s this beautiful description of how a woman discovers that she missed her period:
As she lay in bed one morning after a night of dreamless sleep, a chance word dropped by Yates set her lazily thinking of the last date on which she had suffered from those normal and not accidental fluctuations of energy that are produced by periodically recurrent causes.
And then when she suspects that she might be pregnant:
Her heart was overflowing with a joy such as she had thought she could never feel again. And with the warm stream of bliss there were gushing fountains of gratitude. She will forgive her husband everything, because he has crowned her life with this ineffable glory. . . Even in the brightly coloured dreams from which realities had so rudely awakened her, she was not advancing towards so triumphant an apotheosis.
Yes, it’s very bombastic and massively wordy. But it’s also quite touching.
Said this about Russell Brand earlier this year, and feel even more strongly about it now about the David Walliams allegations: there should be a staggered age of consent.
Someone in their thirties has no business having sex with a teenager, even if they’re ‘legal’!
https://x.com/AyoCaesar/status/2120193233867112868?a=rQYlWdoPP24DUy8NLOE&s=19
This approach would have deprived me of my nephew and niece, whose parents met when my sister was 19 and my future brother-in-law was 31. There was never anything remotely icky about it. He wanted nothing but a committed relationship from the start and proposed within a couple of years.
People met, fell in love, formed a family, and had children. Everybody should be so lucky. There are no similarities between this wholesome, normal story and whatever Brand and his accusers engaged in. And everybody knows this. We all instinctively find the activities of the Cornell Seven and Jane Doe disgusting, even though they are all the same age. It’s not the age difference, but the activity that is repellent.
It’s not the age difference, but the nature of the relationship that bothers people, but we have been conditioned to be utterly unable to say this. Once you allow yourself to admit that consensual doesn’t mean good, moral, or acceptable, everything becomes much clearer. And we do admit it in every other sort of relationship except for the sexual. It’s only in the realm of sex that we twist ourselves into pretzels, trying to fit our very normal and good moral outrage into the Procrustean bed of consent.
I’m helping out at the school book fair today. Klara is only ten, so she was very happy to see me there. She came over to me, gave me a hug, and then engaged me in conversations with her group of friends.
It’s not going to be like this for long. She’s coming to the stage where she will pretend I don’t exist at this type of events. This is a very important and necessary stage because without it, you end up with a perennially single 40-year-old who says that her mom is her best friend.
The other mom who was helping is the mother of a boy who has liked Klara since kindergarten. I made enormous efforts to impress her in a positive way, because who knows? She might end up being the mother of the groom at my daughter’s wedding. People will find it hard to believe, but I’m extremely fun if I make an effort. Which I almost never do because I find it exhausting.
When you’re celebrating Native Heritage Month, if you’re not including the contributions, efforts & struggles of Afro-Indigenous/Freedmen relatives then you’re anti-Black. Simple as that.
https://x.com/oodhamboi/status/2120260235038540237?a=uAs938tZ1AqF-uEMGXk&s=19
The new iteration of woke is as tiresome as the previous ones.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
This is so beautiful!! Thank you so much. N and Klara gave me a little painting from my favorite local…
Congratulations! Did you know that “In the French tradition, this is the noces de rose, or rose anniversary”? What a…
I read this interesting story (in Russian) – an example of Jewish life – https://auvasilev.livejournal.com/2463561.html
“squeeze my modern brain through a weird keyhole” Some movies can do something like that. The first time I saw…
Right??? A beautiful sight to see. And by the way, I did ask my husband whether the comment about how…
It has been fascinating to live through progressively deeper questioning about the nature of humanity, reality, the nature and purpose…
It’s most definitely going in that direction. Children who grow up watching short-form videos on a screen for a large…
Happy Anniversary! A special bouquet! https://www.theblackpeppercorn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/How-to-Roast-Peeled-Garlic-in-the-Oven-5.jpg
Congratulations and many happy returns of the day! -K
“to nudge people toward the idea that AI is conscious” Would I sound like a crazy paranoid lunatic if I…
AI is most certainly not conscious. After I shared the list of the books I read since 2008 with AI,…
I expect the real point of the article is to nudge people toward the idea that AI is conscious because…
Happy anniversary! A loving marriage is indeed a wonderful state
Historically the Dutch East India company restricted expansion in SA, since conflict would reduce their profits. It was the arrival…
Here is a link to review / discussions of that 1970s book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22478.The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
Actually, this does help. Thank you for saying that. I have to keep telling myself that I must respect her…
We definitely had a great middle class society in those days. The only problem was 80% of the population were…
My mother was just the opposite of yours — she went to every doctor appointment, took every test she was…
That’s the first I’d heard of it.
There are certain medieval authors I’ve greatly enjoyed for this reason– because I have to sort of squeeze my modern…
Many years!
One of the leading white opponents of apartheid in SA is now considered the leading representative of white privilege. https://newsday.co.za/south-africa/23136/the-woman-who-exposed-the-steve-biko-cover-up-and-now-wants-to-become-johannesburg-mayor/
Way to go Kid, wishing both of you many, many more ;-D
Thank you. This is precisely it, and this theory also offers an explanation of how the Spaniards defeated the Aztecs…
Thank you!!!
There was something that happened between the Age of Empires and today. That something is the goal of my conservatism.…
Congratulations!
This was the problem in Zimbabwe. Mugabe actually lost the popular vote. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23929752
I don’t understand this argument. In my grandparents’ day Britain ruled one quarter of the world. How is the current…
Многая літа, многая літа, многая літа!Во здравіє, во спасеніє!Многая літа, многая літа, многая літа! літа!
“wonder what their consciousness was like” The story in question is a very quick summary of Julian Jayne’s theory of…
The US had already lost manufacturing to Germany and Japan. Might as well adapt to the new world order.
The Dutch settled in SA because we are the half way point on the sea route from Europe to Asia.…
Многая літа, літа,Многая літа!Во здравіє во спасеніє!Многая, многая літа!
It’s absolutely fascinating to think about it. That’s why I love the study of history and reading texts from the…
I wonder what their consciousness was like? No way to tell, I suppose, but I enjoy thinking about things like…
I was about to write that I don’t see why people would downvote something so factual and grounded in reality,…
I was going to tell my analyst this morning about this issue, forgetting the name of my mother’s cancer. All…
“I’ll have to tell my own doctor about this.” Have you thought of emailing the name to yourself not long…
“different from the African Americans here in the Midwest” My first, sort of educated guess… was maybe that most AA’s…
