Clarissa's Blog

I’m no stranger to making people mad on social media, but it’s very sad that one of the biggest bouts of anger that I ever managed to provoke was when I described how much we were assigned to read in my undergraduate program back in the early 2000s.

People go nuts and accuse me of inventing it, and I never even mentioned that all the reading we were expected to do was in a foreign language. And it was fine. I don’t remember anybody complaining or offering it as a topic of conversation that there was too much reading.

Apparently, there’s some new course at Harvard which requires students to read one book per week, and everybody is extremely impressed by how rigorous that is. It’s like that world of dusty, warm mom-and-pop shops. It was normal, it was real, and now it’s gone. People get angry and emotional when you tell them about this actually quite recent past because they know deep down that they have been robbed. But they don’t want to accept it.

There is a publishing house in Spain that publishes books for pretentious woke people. For example, it’s considered very chic in a progressive, Portlandia kind of way to leave a book by this publisher lying on your coffee table or on your corporate desk at work. It’s this really hilarious idea of signaling that you are on the side of the downtrodden by buying overpriced books, many of which transmit boutique, far-left ideas that are of interest only to the very privileged.

Of course I am in academia so I am a lot more pretentious than the aspiring middle-management girlbosses and the fading hipsters who love these books. The books increase their status but decrease mine. But in any case, this is not the funny part. The reason I’m writing the post is that the name of this publishing house is Blackie Books.

That Spanish neoliberal strivers who are desperate to be Anglo love this publisher is never going to quit being funny.

Poor saps.

Why did people dislike my post about the parent-teacher meeting? Is it because of the joke about my mother’s death? We’re Ukrainians. We use a lot of dark humor to deal with trauma. If you heard the massively popular comedy routines about the war that are done by stand-up comedians in Ukraine today, you would probably keel over.

I thought ever since Camus mocked the idea that there was one correct way to mourn the death of your mother, people got over it. But apparently not. For people who want to be judgmental, I talked to my mother (and I don’t mean briefly, I mean very long conversations) at least once but often twice a day, every single day since my father died in 2022. Every single bloody day, I listened to her weep for up to an hour and tell me how her life has no meaning and everything, including me, is horrible. What have you done for yours, Mr. and Mrs. Judgmental?

I came in touch with the world of dusty, cluttered mom and pop shops in a fading little town, and I’m ravaged by the feeling of nostalgia over this wonderful world that was lost, discarded, sacrificed to passive-aggressive efficiency of citizens of nowhere in particular.

At the parent-teacher meeting yesterday, Klara’s teacher gave me two papers. One listed Klara’s reading grade for the first term as B+. The other said that, based on the results of standardized testing, she reads better than 100% of fifth-graders in the district.

The teacher explained that the mismatch between the skill and the grade happened because Klara didn’t hand in some assignments when we were away.

I think it’s wonderful that the school doesn’t do grade inflation. I’m very heartened by the rigorous procedures. This rational form of gladness, however, did not preclude me from telling the teacher that “yes, we’ve been away. To spend some time with my dying mother. Who then died. But at least we got to spend some time with her before she died. Which is why Klara didn’t hand in those assignments. I thought it was very important that she got to hold her dying grandmother’s hand right before she died, you know?”

It sounds just as bad in the original Spanish.

Also, you will never guess where this youth who raped the woman is from. Completely unexpected. The bastard sweet innocent boy also assaulted the people who tried to intervene as he was raping the victim.

Strangely, we never hear of rape culture when these youths rape women. Instead, every effort is made to make them sound less threatening.