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.

RD Situation Update

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

Our reader sent an update on the RD situation:

My friend, I’m with you on this beyond what you can even imagine. I’m in this every day, and I’m at the end of my tether. Here’s an example.

I have a colleague, Professor T, who is retiring. Being a very responsible and meticulous person, Professor T informed the administration in July of 2025 that he was going to retire in August of 2026. More than a year in advance. He emailed everybody who might be affected by his retirement and cc-ed me. I also informed the administration that he was retiring. I put it in the budget and in the Annual Report. I signed the retirement paperwork in February. I created and posted a schedule for Fall of 2026 without Professor T who is – get that – retiring. So he won’t be teaching. Because he’s retiring.

Yesterday, yes, yesterday, my friend, April 29, 2026, an angry administrator showed up to tell me that we failed to inform them that Professor T was retiring.

“You didn’t file any of the paperwork!” he said.

Professor T and I stared in mute amazement. The secretary was the first to come to and she rolled in the ream of paperwork we all signed and submitted months ago.

“Well, we’ll have to re-sign it because there are no signatures on my copy,” said the administrator, waving a blank copy of the exact same form we showed him.

In silence, I signed his document.

I’m not burnt out because I don’t like teaching or research. No, students are great. Research is going fantastic. It’s this kind of shit that’s getting to me. Because Professor T’s situation is one of I don’t know how many ludicrous things that I have to deal with. He’s my most responsible, reliable professor who is taking early retirement because he’s tired of this absolute crap. Nobody is being hired to replace him. Just like nobody was hired to replace the other 4 professors at my department who retired since 2022.

You simply can’t make a university run on 1/3 of its workforce and expect good results. Now the general public, whom we are supposed to serve, is noticing. I’m extremely embarrassed about what your friend experienced and I confirm that this isn’t an outlier. It’s how things are because we are terribly mismanaged.

Sorry for the rant but you hit a very sore spot. Thank you for bringing it up because it’s very important and must be talked about.

Bertsolari

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Klara spent last evening composing cheers for her Dad and performing them on the lawn outside while he was mowing.

Here’s one of the cheers:

“We love Daddy, he’s our man. To every challenge he replies “yes, I can!””

She went on and on in this vein like a Basque improviser.

Multiculti Russia

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The idea of multiculturalism and replacement of whites is the motivating force of today’s Russia. Here’s one of many Russian propaganda videos expressing this idea:

I remind you that the word “Russian” has been banned from official use in documents in Russia for 15 years because it’s offensive to minorities.