Opinions, art, debate
The New Yorker has immortalized me on its recent cover:
Except for the glasses, this is totally how I look. I love reading my Kindle on the Montreal subway. And I’m so angelic and long-suffering that I’m almost sprouting wings. So I’m taking this as a tribute to myself and to all the other angelic Kindle-lovers with wild hair.
Thank you, Dame Eleanor Hull for letting me know.
I know that everybody must be sick and tired of my rantings about the excessive use of the passive voice in feminist writing. This is an important topic, though. Just like #OWS protesters, many feminist writers suffer from addressing vague complaints to unidentified sources of aggravation and this undermines any hope for productive activism. Take the following excerpt, for example:
I wear makeup. Not much — unobservant people would call me a non-makeup wearer — but enough to cover the “imperfections” and make my lips and cheeks a bit more rosier than they were when I woke up? Why do I do this? Generally I’m treated better when I look “prettier” in society’s eyes. Conversely, I have the choice of going barefaced, which I have on occasion. But that choice comes with the baggage of being labeled “unfeminine,” “unkempt” or “unprofessional.”
This post leaves the most interesting part of the story concealed from view. Who are the people that treat this blogger better when her cheeks are rosier and label her as “unkempt” when they are less rosy? These must be people with a lot of free time on their hands to enable them to notice the degree of rosiness of everybody’s cheeks. So I’m genuinely curious who they are.
Another question that is even more important is how the feminist in question reacts to these observations. Let’s imagine she is at work and her boss comes up to her to say, “Look, your lips aren’t all that rosy today which makes you unfeminine, so that promotion we discussed? Forget about it!” I’m not saying this can’t happen. Idiots abound, so everything is possible. It would be great to hear what the insulted feminist does in response. Takes the jerk up on a sexual harassment charge, I hope. Now, this is a story I would like to read about instead of these vague complaints about some unspecified evildoers who treat one badly and label one all kinds of things.
I’d love to participate in this struggle myself. However, I haven’t encountered a single person in the course of my long and eventful life who would be willing to discuss the lack of rosiness of my body parts. I wouldn’t be averse to meeting such an individual, to be honest, because it would be so much fun to unload on them and then describe the process here on the blog.
Sometimes, I wear a lot of makeup. Sometimes, I wear none. And for the life of me, I can’t say that anybody even notices. My colleagues are very busy people who have more important things to do than notice whether I have lipstick on. My boss notices whether I have published anything recently but I can’t imagine him giving a rat’s ass about whether I use mascara. I’m certain that he’d prefer to see me with zero makeup but a stack of publications to seeing me with the best makeup in the world and no publications. My students obviously could care less about my makeup. My friends are supposed to love me no matter how I look and calling each other “unkempt” or “unprofessional” is simply not something that we do to each other.
Mind you, I’m not saying that women don’t get treated worse if they avoid makeup. I don’t know if they do or they don’t because every single article or blog post I have ever seen on the subject suffers from the same vagueness as the one quoted above. I suggest we start putting nouns into our sentences. That’s the only way to create actual change. Instead of saying, “I’m being treated badly and labeled XYZ”, let’s say “Today, Mr. Such-and-such came up to me at work and made an unacceptable comment about my appearance. I told him that he is a vile jerk and I will be reporting him to the Dean’s office. This is a procedure I followed and I hope it will be useful to other women who find themselves in the same situation.”
Wouldn’t you agree that the second course of action is a lot more likely to produce results?
A president of a huge nuclear power who is this insecure is a very dangerous person, indeed.
I don’t know which enemy of humanity first came up with the idea that getting high school students to write the so-called book reports will teach them to write well. All I know is that I just got through over a dozen academic essays that are inspired by the high-school book report model. And I can say that the book report is a horrible practice that needs to be abandoned as soon as possible.
This is how these book-report essays are structured:
– The essay title is always of the “Essay 1, Essay 2, Final Essay” variety. All my exhortations to come up with a meaningful title seem to fall on deaf ears. Alternatively, people might think that this is what a meaningful title is like.
– Before the essay begins, there is always some exceptionally cheesy quote that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything but that kind of sounds warm and fuzzy. At this point, I’m almost tempted to offer bonus points to anybody who spares me the aggravation of reading an epigraph to their essay.
– The student starts the essay by offering at least a page-long analysis of whether the “reading was easy to read” (sic!). The miserable professor has to slog through the endless recounting of how “first, the reading was kind of hard for me to understand. In the middle it was sort of easy for me to understand. But then in the end it was again very hard for me to understand. Altogether I’d say the reading was fairly easy for me to understand.” (All of the essays I grade this semester were written in the students’ first and only language, by the way. And the readings they analyzed were also all in English.)
Now imagine getting through a dozen of those one after another. Fun, eh?
– After the hard to understand / easy to understand part, the inevitable “how this made me feel” portion of the essay always follows. After reading several pages of minute analysis of how each part of the text made the patient the analysand the student feel, you forget whether you are a psychotherapist or a professor of literature.
– There is always (and I repeat, always) a discussion of whether “the author uses highly descriptive words to bring his point across.” What the point that is brought across with these highly descriptive words actually is always remains shrouded in mystery. I still have 17 more essays to grade this weekend and, I swear to God, if I come across the “highly descriptive words” once again, I will howl.
– A little less frequent topic of discussion in such essays is whether “the author’s outlook is positive or negative.” Am I the only person to feel that the word “outlook” is horribly overused nowadays?
– The book-report-inspired essay never fails to end on a note of condescension towards the writers whose work was being analyzed. “Overall, I’d say Julio and Jorge [Cortazar and Borges] are OK sort of writers. I mean they are nothing special of course. They obviously tried hard to create there little pieces so that’s commendable. But often they failed. They should be commended for trying hard though.”
I understand the need to get students to read and to reflect on what they have read as early as possible. These book reports fail to do that, though. All they manage to achieve is instilling really bad writing habits in students and it’s weary work eradicating those habits in college.
Now that I have my Kindle Fire, I use it to listen to radio stations from all over the world. Once, I decided to listen to the Echo of Moscow, the radio station that is considered to be the most progressive and anti-government station in Russia.
I tuned into a show that had already been going on for a while and was immediately transported back into 1982.
“The US wants to destroy us,” the host and the interviewees were agreeing. “They will not rest until they exterminate every Russian in existence. The very raison d’être of the Americans is to destroy Russia. They care about nothing else. And, of course, now that the US is so poor, they envy us our wealth and our empire. They have no future, while we are becoming the new world power.”
I thought, at first, that this was a broadcast of an old program from the times of the Cold War. Then, however, I heard a reference to President Obama (who also seems to hate Russians with a vengeance, according to this radio show) and realized that the program was contemporary.
A little later, a guest of the show suggested that Americans import their stupid Hollywood movies to prevent the Russians from procreating as much as they could. At that point, I had to go to class, so I missed what I’m sure was a fascinating explanation of how Hollywood movies mess with the procreation of Russians. Remember, that the hysteria of “we are not procreating enough and will be overtaken by more rapidly procreating races” is going on at full strength in Russia.
The anti-American rhetoric is promoted at every level of Russia’s hierarchy of power. On Sunday, the elections to the Russian parliament (the Duma) took place. The results of the elections were egregiously falsified. Responsible citizens who acted as observers at the voting polls were intimidated, threatened with being fired from their jobs, assaulted, and beaten. The falsifications were so shameless that even the people of Russia (who are mostly disinterested in political activism) took to the streets in protest.
Protests took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Police dispersed the protests brutally.
Yesterday, Putin gave his first public speech about the protests. And you know who is to blame for the protests, according to Putin? The officials of his party who organized the massive falsifications of the votes? The citizens of Russia who don’t know their place and dare to believe that democracy in Russia is possible? No, of course not. The real evildoer here is. . . Hillary Clinton who, according to Putin, organized the protests:
Putin said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had encouraged “mercenary” Kremlin foes by criticizing the vote.
“She set the tone for some opposition activists, gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work,” Putin told supporters.
And you know what is really sad? The protesters are a very small minority. Most people in Russia will be very happy to believe that everything is great and that the bad, evil Americans engineered the protests against the honest and truly democratic elections in Russia. They will believe that Hillary Clinton gave signals to the protesters because they are all paid lackeys of American imperialism, rather than responsible, engaged citizens.
There are many discussions going on about Iran right now. Will Iran become a nuclear power? What will happen when it does?
Nobody wants to talk about Russia, though. Russia is already a huge nuclear power. It is also a country that owns a lot of oil and natural gas, has a huge population, cannot be defeated militarily, and is consumed by a huge bout of anti-Western hysteria.
Western politicians have been bamboozled by the empty talk about democracy and the end of the Cold War that Russia has been offering for two decades. This is all a sham, though. The Cold War continues. And I have no doubt that the side to lose this war will be the one that refuses to recognize that the war goes on.
5. Now, this is very important: unemployment does not mean that your partner gets to check out of any aspect of the relationship. Being supportive does not equal tolerating snappishness, moodiness, aggression and rudeness from your partner. You are not their therapist or their wet nurse. Adults address their psychological issues without using their partner as a punching bag. Never let such behavior slide and if you are tempted to do so, remember, you are not being supportive. You are just being condescending. Taking on a parental role towards your partner is never healthy.
I hope I don’t need to mention that subjecting an unemployed partner to your moodiness, depressive moments and aggression is just as wrong.
6. I do not recommend that household duties be renegotiated because if unemployment. If the division of chores in your relationship is unfair, it definitely needs to be renegotiated. But not during the time when your partner is weakened by unemployment.
If the distribution of duties is fair, then there is no need to change anything during unemployment. I suggest preserving as much as possible from the pre-unemployment lifestyle because that will make it easier to return to it once your partner finds a job.
7. Most importantly, I wanted to mention that once an unhealthy patterns sets in, it’s extremely hard to change it. We all hope that unemployment will not be protracted. It can, however, stretch out for a long period of time. And if you expect that after your partner finds a job things will immediately be restored to their pre-unemployment state, you couldn’t be more mistaken. A relationship doesn’t go to sleep during a jobless period. It grows and develops. And after unemployment is over, you will have to live with the results of this development.
This might sound paradoxical but the essays my students submit in Spanish are better in terms of grammar, the use of vocabulary and the correctness of the sentence structure than those they submit in English. I think this happens because in the Spanish courses we get to teach them how to create a good sentence from scratch. Nobody seems to do that for them when they write in their native language.
What is it that they do in their English classes in high school?
Since people are writing in to ask, I will answer right here: no, I’m not planning to blog about this so-called “study” on how often people think about sex and what this means in terms of gender. I’m also not planning to link to it or analyze it. And I’m not going to do those things because the study is stupid. And the attention it’s getting from bloggers and journalists is evidence of deeply unhealthy attitudes to sexuality in this society.
I’m very interested in how people think. For years, I’ve been bugging everybody I know with questions as to how their thinking process is organized. I discovered that most people don’t think in complete sentences. Often, people’s thoughts take the form of images. Instead of telling themselves, “I need to go to work now”, they have an image of themselves going to work. Some people have a sort of a movie playing in their heads all the time.
Other people think in fragments of sentences and images. Some, like myself, think in the form of dialogues. I always choose somebody I’m speaking to in my head and orchestrate conversations with them. This can be a person I know, a character from a book, the readers of my blog, my students, etc.
There are people whose thinking is based on associations. They see something that reminds them of whatever that immediately reminds them of something else. Breaking down such a rapid process of generating associations and calculating its ingredients is next to impossible.
I’m sure there are many other ways in which people generate thoughts. However, it is really hard for me to imagine that the majority of people on this planet have complete, identifiable, easy-to-count thoughts of the “I need to have sex now” or “Sex is good” variety.
Physiological drives that this “study” attempts to quantify (food, sleep and sexual desire) are, by their very nature, not quantifiable. I couldn’t count how many times a day I think about these things because I can’t say that I have separate, concrete thoughts about these needs that could be counted. When I’m sleep-deprived (like I have been this week, for example), I can’t say that the number of “thoughts” I have about sleep increases. I slow down, my reactions are less sharp, I get irritable and drink too much coffee. I also have less thoughts about anything because my energy is low.
Only a very profound fear of sexuality would suggest to anybody that the number of sex-related thoughts is evidence of anything. An even more profound terror of sexuality is required to believe that you can quantify those thoughts and use those numbers as basis for any sort of analysis.
This obsession with quantifying the unquantifiable is really getting to me, people.
As I shared on this blog recently, my husband was unemployed for two years. During this period of protracted unemployment, I can honestly say that I was the most supportive partner anybody could hope for. I really did myself proud on this one and N. agrees that I was a bedrock of unwavering support to him.
Many people are finding themselves unemployed nowadays, which is why I decided to share my principles of how to offer true support to an unemployed partner (UP, for short).
1. When your partner tells you s/he has been fired, the first impulse is always to say, “I will support you for as long as it takes for you to find a new job.” As understandable as this impulse is, I suggest you resist it. It will be highly counter-productive to make any spur-of-the-moment promises that you might not be able to keep.
So take a moment to consider things rationally and calmly. Evaluate your psychological and financial resources. It’s easy to promise support for “as long as it takes.” But have you really considered how you will handle the situation on the practical level if your partner’s unemployment lasts for 2 years? How about 5 years? How about 15? What if they never find a job? Are you sure that you will not start feeling resentful and overburdened?
Believe me, it is much more honest and helpful to tell your partner that you will be able to support them for a set number of years or months instead of making wild promises based on nothing but emotions of the moment.
2. There will be days, weeks or even months when the UP will not be looking for a job. This does not mean s/he has given up and will never look for a job again. All this means is that your partner is trying to preserve his or her sanity. Job searches are difficult and stressful. Most people can’t face getting rejected and failing at something so important on a daily basis for a long time. If your partner needs to take breaks from active searching for a job, this means s/he is doing what is needed to preserve him or herself psychologically.
3. It is neither helpful nor encouraging to pester the UP with questions about what they have done today in their job search. Sometimes, the UP will want to talk about the job search but sometimes s/he won’t. That’s perfectly normal. If the UP needs a few days, weeks or months when the job search is not discussed, then that’s what they need and you should just accept it.
4. Unemployment is bad. However, it is not the end of the world. The UP will still want to laugh, have an occasional good time, go out, and treat themselves to something nice. This is a lot healthier than sitting around with a tragic face and depriving oneself of anything pleasing.
(To be continued. . .)
I publish so many stories about the weird things students say and write because I want to entertain my readers. This, however, might create an impression that all of our students suck. That is, of course, not the case. The egregious cases happen but they are not the majority. This is why I want to publish a post about the great students we have.
Today, I attended the presentations by our graduating students. I am exhausted and can hardly move I’m so tired. But listening to those presentations was profoundly inspiring. A student who barely spoke Spanish at all when he came to our department delivered a brilliant analysis of the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in fluent Spanish. I still remember him struggling with the present tense conjugations and now he can read, analyze and explain such complex texts. And you know who got him interested in Spanish philosophy? Khm, khm.
Another student did really stunning research on the drug wars in Mexico. He rattled out the presentation at a break-neck speed because there was so much fascinating material he had to deliver.
We also heard very insightful analysis of Spanish movies that try to recover the historic memory of the Spanish Civil war.
These students come to us mostly unaware that other cultures exist. They speak no foreign languages and their vision of the world is extremely limited. We teach them to speak languages, get them to travel, and introduce them to the artistic production of other countries. And it’s so beautiful to see how country bumpkins who are not sure if femicide is good or bad and think that Argentina is a province of Spain are transformed into citizens of the world.
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