My mom and me, age four.
My facial expression in the photo is not accidental.
Other than her natural hair color being pitch black, we look identical. Even before my video appearances, complete strangers would…
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Continue reading →: Squirrel Nutkin and the Bible
Klara is making plans for the week.
“Today I’m going to be Blizzard the Dolphin,” she says ponderously. “Then tomorrow I will be Squirrel Nutkin.”
What an amazing age when you can be Squirrel Nutkin and commit to the bit with complete seriousness.
On the way to school this morning, we talked about how different parts of the Bible resonate with each other and how some things that appear later in the scripture are introduced in the earlier books of the Bible. Klara started the conversation, giving some examples that her teacher discussed in class. And then I gave more examples, and we analyzed them together.
This is why ten is such a wonderful age. On the one hand, there’s still the unselfconsciousness of declaring yourself to be Squirrel Nutkin, but on the other, the child is grown enough to have truly interesting, deep conversations.
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Continue reading →: New Video
Speaking of tapings, I’m going on live in 30 minutes about the midterm elections in the US:
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Continue reading →: Punditry and Appearance
One thing that slightly exasperates me in my career as a pundit is that people pay a lot of attention to my physical appearance. I’m not trying to position myself as a beauty blogger or a fashion guru. All I ever talk about is politics. But people notice and comment incessantly on every detail of hair, makeup, and outfits.
Here on the blog, I like and appreciate when readers make comments about how I looked during my appearances. Here we talk about everything, and we’ve got a cozy family-like environment. I don’t mind coming off as goofy and weird or making mistakes on the blog.
But outside of this space, it’s different. For instance, I have two tapings one after another with two different shows. I need two completely different outfits because one show is live and the other will be published the next day. If I appear in the same clothes, it will be discussed until the Second Coming that I go around in the same clothes for a week and what a shame that such a smart, interesting person is a total slob. Then somebody will call my mom with these comments, and I will really never hear the end of it.
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Continue reading →: Fashion Backwater
We are such a backwater. It’s really cute. These baggy pants that have been insanely popular among young girls are finally going out of fashion:
But in our town, I saw them for the first time on a teenage girl yesterday. She is now undoubtedly a fashion icon in her middle school. We always catch up with these fashion trends two years after the fact, looking like a cute little time capsule.
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Continue reading →: Q&A about Crash
OK, this is going to be a first:
I never get a chance to say this, so thank you for the opportunity, but no, I haven’t read the novel. I’ve seen the movie, though.
To be honest, I had no idea there was a novel. The David Cronenberg movie is a masterpiece. It’s one of my favorite movies. Strangely, I never investigated where it came from, and it’s a bit of a shock to discover after all this time that there is a novel behind the film.
Hah! There’s actually a book, wow. I don’t think I’m going to read it because I’m too attached to the film. Plus, what’s great about the movie is that there is no story. It’s all about the image, the sound, the feel. It’s also such a perfect 1990s movie.
I want to watch more movies, but nobody makes masterpieces like Crash any longer.
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Continue reading →: The Fifth Reading
So that nobody thinks my life is too easy, I have started to reread the book I will present on in Salamanca for the fifth time.
Of course, it’s also true that I love this book and would use any excuse to reread it.
OK, my life is easy.
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Comments:
8Continue reading →: Why Communism FailedWhy did communism fail? Because it couldn’t do the one thing that, according to its own theory, it had to achieve, which is to create a new type of human beings. It didn’t manage to become part of the subjectivation process. It remade countries, institutions, buildings, seas, forests, and so on. But it did not remake human beings. Marx said himself that unless human beings were remade, there was no hope. And they weren’t. So the whole experiment collapsed. Not before murdering millions, of course.
This is why I’m interested in how subjectivity is refashioned. This is at the bottom of everything. The inner architecture of human beings. And why some regimes can’t touch it while others have people pushing each other out of the way in their rush to change their sense of self.
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Continue reading →: Deadlocked
The Lindsey Clancy jury says its deadlocked. With nine women on the jury, what is the likelihood that at least a couple would not be marinated in profound feelings of pity for themselves? Because that’s what the support for Clancy is about. Nobody gives a hoot about Clancy. The women who jump up and down in support of the child murderer want to attract attention to their own suffering. Try to talk to one of them, and you will see how she immediately segues into her own terrible ordeal of not being everybody’s center of attention every second of every day.
Finding Clancy guilty would entail an acceptance that their own suppurating resentment isn’t justified. Their entire narrative of self as suffering, ill-used victims will collapse. And they don’t have any substitute way of seeing themselves if this one is yanked away.
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Continue reading →: My New Article
The article for which I have my September 15 deadline is hard because it’s about masculinity. Masculinity is impossible to write about because it is one of the most belabored topics in the humanities. Anything of even the slightest interest and depth that could have been said on this subject was said back in the 1980s, and people mostly keep repeating whatever was said back then. Even thinking about thinking about (sic) masculinity bores me to tears. Which is exactly why I chose to contribute to a volume on masculinity. I like a challenge, and this topic is like trying to milk a male goat. Something will eventually trickle out, but nobody will want to consume it.
So here is what I came up with: neoliberalism doesn’t give a hoot about your gender identity, sexuality, or how traditional or non-traditional your masculinity is. To the contrary, it offers up complete sexual freedom, liberated from any form of judgment or constraint, as a consolation prize for robbing you of economic stability. You can be gender fluid all you want, as long as you accept never being economically mobile in return. So maybe let’s stop prattling endlessly about masculinities and turn our attention to the issue of class.
I don’t use the words “prattling endlessly” in the article, but this is the gist. And there’s a lot of Chirbes in the article. I’m sure everybody on here is sick of Chirbes so I won’t repeat those parts.
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