“You have a great blog,” my ultra-polite Peruvian brother-in-law tells me. “The only thing is that you are sometimes very harsh on the commenters. Of course, they really deserve it but wow, you are harsh. It’s all their own fault, of course. I think.”

“The only complaint I have about the blog,” says my sister who is so outspoken and opinionated that I seem like a total wallflower by her side, “is that you are too nice and acquiescent with the commenters. What’s up with the endless ‘yes, you are right’, ‘exactly’ and ‘I agree’? That’s just boring.”

“You have great commenters on your blog,” my father says. “Thanks to them I discovered that there are many true intellectuals in the US.”

Dear readers and fellow bloggers,

As you might already kow, I am now visiting my family in Canada. I made the mistake of not bringing my netbook with me, and as a result, I can’t be as effective as a blogger as I normally am. For one, there are many typos in my posts and especially comments, for which I apologize. Blogging from an iPad makes correcting typos a horrible drag.

Also, I haven’t been able to visit my favorite blogs and comment on them. I only visit the blog of the scholar who is reviewing my manuscript to analyze his posts obsessively for hints at the poor quality of my writing. Because every post ever written has to be about me, of course. Crazy, I know.

I try to post and answer comments as much as I can. I can’t do it as often as I would have liked to but I still read every single one on my cell phone. Sometimes, the phone refuses to cooperate and I can’t respond to comments.

Thank you all for stickng by the blog in spite of all this and making this week the most successful one for the blog so far. The last time I went on vacation, the number of visits to he blg dropped, which caused me anxiety and abandonment issues. 🙂

In the discussion that followed my post on Charlie Manson’s cult (sorry, I still can’t add links to my posts, but you can find it easily in the list of the most popular posts in the right-hand panel), people concentrated on the death penalty issue. This is understandable since it is a complex and divisive subject. I wanted, however, to draw everybody’s attention to the fact that the female murderers are treated far less severely than the man who was not even present when the murders in question were committed and whose only crime consisted of telling the women to kill.

In her book The Dead End Feminism, Elisabeth Badinter discusses how difficult it is to conduct any research that demonstrates that women are as capable of violence as men. It disturbs our narrative of women as vicims and damsels in distress who never inflict violence but always suffer from it. Badinter mentions the research on female Nazis who committed unspeakale crimes during the Holocaust. She also discusses the contribution of women to the Rwandan genocide. Such research, says Badinter, is always ignored in the academic community of the Western Europe and the US. This was surprising to me since the post-war literature of Ukraine and Russia is filled with the images of depraved female SS-members. I had no idea that people still needed to be convinced that the Holocaust was not created by men alone.

The discussion of the London riots has moved into the ever-boring and extremely predictable terrain of blaming the Twitter. One boring pundit after another tells us how the riots either would not have happened or would have caused a lot less damage had the Internet not interfered.

This is the trick that lazy minds love the most nowadays. No matter what happens, let’s blame the bloggers, the Twitterers, and the Facebookers. The reasons for this are clear: the traditional journalists are losing the competition with the free sources of information online and it makes them rabid.

I have been reading this really great novel called The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar. The book was really impressive until its last thrid where the author launched into the same old tired anti-blogging rant. Tobar is a professional journalist and his resentment towards bloggers overpowered his talent as a fiction writer.

It’s normal for academics to keep a portrait of their favorite writer or scientist on the walls of their offices. Sometimes, however, people get all weird about that.

Once, I went to the office of a Canadian scholar who was Chair of a Department of Slavic Studies. I started talking to him, and then I noticed a big portrait of Vladimir Putin on his wall. And I kind of didn’t feel like talking to him about anything any more. I tried convincing myself that it was some kind of an ironic post-modern gesture but there weren’t any horns or tail drawn on the portrait. It looked like it had been hung there completely in earnest.

The scholar in question specialized in the Silver Age of Russian poetry, which is an area completely unconnected to Putin.

That was kind of scary. And it was a very good university, too.

As I always say, people are weird.

My sister just referred to the breast pump and all of its paraphernalia as “a castrating apparatus that robs you of your identity.”

I think that’s brilliant.

This wasn’t all the Overt Dictionary had to say about THE individual. Here is another curious statement (the punctuation of the original is preserved): “The Mass Media: a machine which attempts to condition the individual into becoming a completely docile, passive, creature.”

“Docile, passive, creature” is too good not to be recorded on my blog.

Since people liked the Overt Dictionary so much, here is a fresh definition via Twitter: “The Mass Media: a group of billionaire owned media outlets, which work to incessantly indoctrinate the individual.”

When I saw the part about “the individual”, I remembered how in the Soviet Union we always had these banners everywhere that said, “Everything we do is in the name of the individual and for the sake of the individual.”

“Oh yes,” we used to joke. “And we even know the name of that individual.” 🙂

I’m sitting at a restaurant where in 1842 Dickens wrote his notes for A Tale of Two Cities. How cool is that??

I’m a huge Dickens fan but this particular novel I don’t like. Still, he was right here, writing it.