Month: April 2012

Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion

~ Clarissa ~ 27 Comments

People have been doing some great blogging recently, so today’s list is quite long.

The state that has the greatest number of abortion restrictions also leads in the number of rapes of school age girls. This is not surprising. You promote hatred of women on the state level and you will see it flourish on interpersonal level, too.

Let’s support with many hits a blogger who really likes me. People with good reading tastes should be promoted. 🙂 People who like me should really be promoted.

“While conservatives are mostly hung up on keeping women, non-whites, gays, and Muslims under control, liberals seem to want to grind fucking everybody under the heels of their giant (sustainable, fair-trade, cruelty-free organic leather) jackboots. But gently. In a caring, eco-friendly manner.” You’ve got to love a blogegr with such a great sense of humor.

“If it’s highly unlikely that you’ll write, decide not to. Don’t hope you will. There’s no particular nobility in that sentiment.” Now, this is a person who writes beautifully.

How to have amazing sex every day.

“In my view, we should treat disgust the way that we treat love. That is to say, if someone tells you that they are in love with someone else, no matter what your personal feelings about the object of their affection, it is appropriate to respect their opinion on this matter. Likewise if someone tells you that they find something disgusting, you should recognize that convincing them otherwise would be a waste of time and energy.” Hear, hear!

Are you aware of this hilarious debacle where a multi-millionaire housewife who hasn’t worked a day in her life goes into a hissy fit when that truth is pointed out? Check out this great post on the subject: “Mrs. Mittens took to twitter to let the world know that she was a stay-at-home mom with five boys, which means she worked plenty. After all, she’s also got three mansions to manage, plus all those swimming pools and stables to clean. Shoveling out the stables alone must be a full-time job.”

Read this important post, people. Please, read it. “Despite the fact that childhood sexual abuse is revolting, it is surprisingly common (statistics are difficult to estimate, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to think it’s around 30% for men & women, if not higher). . . This takes me back to my beginning discussion of schizophrenia. So many folks are intent on biologizing the disorder and ignoring the social factors. “We, parents, aren’t to blame for this psychotic disorder. We’re victims too”. Sure, maybe you are. But I want to also be vigilant to the fact that psychotic disorders often have historical and traumatic origins.”

Why abortion is not genocide.

I’m normal, I’m normal! Here is a person who is as much into creating graphs of his daily activities as I am. I’m not alone in my graph-making obsession!

“Sorry, GOP. You can’t perpetuate inequality and sexism–and expect women to support you. You’re waging a war on women. It’s not simply rhetoric. It’s fact.”

Afraid of giving talks? This post could help.

I don’t know who this Hound they are talking about is supposed to be, but this is the meal of my dreams.

Reasons to write by hand.

Will North Korea attempt a nuclear test?

This lament of a compulsive book buyer could have been written by me. It’s rare for me to identify with anybody’s experiences as fully as I do here.

“No one can read your mind — if you disapprove of a comment, but refuse to either confront the commenter or delete his leavings, other people reading your site simply assume you are okay with what he said. How can they know? You won’t even say anything yea or nay, because in your head you’re above all that. But no one can see you up there on your shining pedestal. It’s one thing to be unconcerned with what people think about you when it comes to your own beliefs and ideas that you have communicated to the world. It’s another to not care what people think about you because you don’t seem to understand that communication comes in many forms, and one of them is silence and inaction on a situation under your control.” I agree completely!

“So this “motherhood is the most important job in the world” thing is an outlier. And it’s a tool used to not give actual mothers their due. It romanticizes what motherhood actually looks like; since the job is So Important, it’s positioned as something that women should be happy to sacrifice for. Of course motherhood should be tedious and financially stressful and uncompensated — your compensation is the smile on your child’s face! And that’s invaluable. If you think otherwise, you are probably some sort of witch.” The entire post is very good, so do read it.

America’s pill-popping capital. This is very scary, people.

The “I’m not going to lie” trend.

“I would love it if, next time I walk into a room and had a sensory overload, instead of having people try to convince me I’m hearing things, or that I’m just wrong, and trying to draw attention to myself for no reason, to accept that I’m not attention seeking (the moment my brain went into overload and I had to cover my ears, I began to wish to be invisible and not draw ANY attention at all), and to accept that I am hearing a sound that is real and there, and to help me deal with it. But above all, I wish that it was safe and acceptable to say “excuse me, my Autism is showing”.”

A great collection of quotes on the horrible damage religious fanatics and moral conservatives cause every single day to our society.

Catholic theologians denounce Paul Ryan as a traitor to Christian values.

And the post of the week: a Canadian blogger offers some very interesting research into the origins of Jenna Talackova, a transgender contestant in Miss Universe contest. This is fascinating stuff, people. I highly recommend.

Happy Easter, Everybody. . .

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

. . . who celebrates today!

Inflicting Happiness

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

Nothing is more annoying than people who try to inflict their understanding of happiness on others and massage the existence of others into their own understanding of what constitutes bliss.

Due to a completely misguided notion of politeness, one never responds to such well-wishers the way one would really like to, namely, “I’d rather submit to 10 years of penal servitude than consider living in what, in your warped worldview, passes for happiness, you officious, irritating creature.” Instead, one just babbles weakly about how, of course, everybody is different, which is why the definitions of happiness may vary. . .

“Oh, bother,” the well-wisher announces loudly. “Of course, everybody wants the same things.” And proceeds to inflict some more joy on miserable interlocutors.

 

Is The Hunger Games a Feminist Novel?

~ Clarissa ~ 44 Comments

I won’t beat around the bush and will just give you my answer instead: no, of course, it isn’t. There is absolutely nothing feminist whatsoever about it. I can’t say that it’s actively anti-feminist either, though. The novel is simply not about that at all.

It’s funny that so many people think The Hunger Games is some sort of a feminist manifesto. For instance, Katha Pollitt, who is usually a very insightful journalist, gushes about the “feral feminism” of both the book and the movie like a teenage fan. These “female warrior” narratives that have become so popular in the past 25 years keep trying to sell us the belief that the most admirable girl of all is the one who has managed to turn into a boy. And I fail to see what’s so feminist and progressive about that idea.

The novel’s protagonist keeps repeating that she is much smaller and weaker physically than her male opponents in the Hunger Games. Yet, because of her great people skills, her capacity to sell her sexual favors successfully and fake sexual desire, her intelligence, her fast running and archery skills, she defeats them all.

I’m sorry, folks, but that’s a load of baloney. In terms of height, girth and muscle strength, women lose to men without a shadow of a doubt. Rare exceptions do not change the general rule. In any competition where brute strength or any sort of athletic abilities are involved, I can guarantee to you that I will lose even to the least athletic of men.

The good news, however, is that this doesn’t matter any more. The world has changed, and the brute physical force means nothing. People who used to make their living by lifting and moving heavy objects are being rendered unemployed by the physically much weaker folks who design the smart machines that can do these jobs much better. The muscle tone and the height are completely irrelevant to how successful and comfortable one will be in life. We, the women, have no need to prove that we can run, shoot, jump and kick ass as well as men. Because even if we can’t, it’s completely unimportant.

The “female warrior” narratives try to sell us some sort of a feminized version of a nerdy teenage boy’s Spiderman fantasy. “I will discover superpowers and will beat up all the men boys on the playground.” When that fantasy is projected on a female protagonist, silliness ensues. Let’s remember that the only battle that Buffy, a far more interesting and complex “female warrior” than Katniss, never manages to win is the one over the right to practice her sexuality as she sees fit. As a woman, i.e. a person who owns her female body, Buffy is a complete and utter failure.

For as long as I’ve been a reader, I have been searching for a female character I could identify with. Male characters like that abound. In The Hunger Games, for example, I feel a lot of affinity for Haymitch. Katniss, however, is as removed from my way of being Bella Swan is. The only real difference between the two is that Katniss is a little clumsier at performing patriarchal female roles: she mothers, albeit reluctantly, both children and adult men, she gradually learns to sell sex, and her entire existence belongs to her family.

And she can shoot a mean arrow. Whoop dee do. How very feminist of her.

Rue’s Race

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Were there really readers who thought that Rue was ” the little blonde innocent girl you picture“? The text says specifically – and on a variety of occasions – that she has dark skin and thick black hair.

One has to have major issues going on to imagine a character described this way as “blonde.”

As a literary critic, I find it very curious when people impose their own psychological problems on the text. I’m now reading criticism on a novel where a 50-year-old protagonist leaves her husband and finds a much younger lover. Many male critics of that age bracket obviously bring something deeply personal to the reading of the book and give strange moralistic rants on how it’s wrong to leave one’s husband right in the middle of their scholarly articles!

I also remember how a very famous critic read the scene where a former husband viciously brutalizes his ex-wife as evidence that their relationship had progressed and they would now be very happy together.

The good news is that in literary criticism such things are rare enough to be memorable. In sociology, however, people do nothing but sell their psychological hangups as scholarship.

Hunger Games: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 34 Comments

On the advice of reader V., I read the first book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games.  This is not my genre but I wasn’t risking anything since Amazon gives these books out for free on Kindle.

I have to say that, considering the genre, the book is quite good. The prose is nothing to write home about but, in spite of the impotence of the vocabulary and the hobbled nature of the grammar structures, there is nothing in this book even remotely resembling the vicious injuries to the English language one has seen in the Twilight series.

Hunger Games is highly entertaining and it reads very easily. As you can see, I read it in a day (a bout of regular Friday night insomnia helped.) The premise has been a little overdone, of course. As I read, I kept wondering why it is that societies that suffer from obesity enjoy fantasizing about starvation so much. I guess such fantasies tickle their appetites and allow them to eat more than they could normally manage to stuff into themselves. I know that all the descriptions of endless meals made me eat like a maniac yesterday.

The main problem I had with the book is how completely inconsistent the main character was. I understand that this is the fantasy genre, but there has got to be at least a pretense at some internal logic in the novel. Katniss, who is extremely self-sufficient, strong, resilient and opinionated, suffers from a debilitating lack of self-esteem. She somehow manages not to know that she is attractive and spends the entire novel alternating between feats of self-reliance and profound belief in herself with extremely obnoxious and unmotivated bouts of “But it isn’t possible that he likes me. Oh, of course he doesn’t like me. And nobody likes me. And this is all a conspiracy because there is no way anybody likes me. And, of course, he, of all people, doesn’t like me. And people in general don’t like me. And if somebody says in public that he is in love with me, it will make everybody laugh at me because I’m probably five years old and I think being loved makes adults look ridiculous.” To me, it made zero sense.

Another problem was that I had to make a huge effort to remember that these characters are supposed to be 16. Peeta, for example, behaves like a very mature 40-year-old man. If anybody has seen this kind of 16-year-old boys, especially among those who, within the structure of their society, are considered sheltered, please let me know.

Later on, I will write a separate post addressing the issue of whether this is a feminist book. This is a debate that has been raging for a while and even The Nation has an article on the subject in its most recent issue, so I want to share my point of view.

This is the end of the academic year and I’m in need of light, distracting reading matter. This means that I will definitely be reading the next two books in the series. I’m not planning on watching the movie because, for one, I have no doubt that Hollywood has made exactly the kind of product that the book tries to criticize: flashy, gaudy, full of obnoxious special effects, with half-naked surgically altered starlets rolling in the mud for the delectation of the viewing audience. Every last shred of the timid social critique that the novel offers will have been excised form the movie.

Besides, I have no doubt that the film producers have cast 25-year-old starlets to play 16-year-old characters. The only people who can play 16-year-olds are either actual 16-year-olds or extremely talented performers of the caliber that Hollywood is not familiar with. Otherwise, this becomes a huge circus where adult men and women pretend to be kids, making themselves look ridiculous in the process.

Of course, if there are people who are willing to tell me that the movie is not that bad, I’m willing to listen.

Do share whether you liked the novel and why. I’m very interested in how people feel about it.

Confiscatory Dreams of Useless Losers

~ Clarissa ~ 51 Comments

On the subject of the most recent post, I have proof for those of you who are wondering why I referred to Liberals as useless.

Just read the following post and never ask me why again:

So I think there should be additional brackets at, say, $5 million (55% tax rate), $10 million (60%), $40 million (65%), $100 million (70%), $400 million (75%), $1 billion (80%), $5 billion (85%), and even $10 billion (90%).  Someday someone will have that much annual income, if they haven’t already.

I’d argue that this principle should apply even more so to the Federal estate tax, which after a certain point should become all but confiscatory.

What shocks me is that somebody could write the following in complete seriousness and not even be ashamed of their resentful, envious, vile, useless, ignorant self-importance. Not only hasn’t the useless creature who’s been churning out these confiscatory fantasies created anything of value, he is also too stupid to open a history book and to read about what happens in societies where dreams of confiscating the untold riches of the billionaires are made true.

For the especially clueless, here is a newsflash: confiscating the money of the ultra rich and sharing it among the ultra poor or pouring it all into social programs makes the entire society hugely, miserably, disgustingly poor. Then, starvation begins. If we had a poor society to begin with, it becomes even poorer as a result of these measures.

How come there are people who still manage somehow not to know that when history textbooks are plentiful and easy to find?

Who has confiscated the brain matter of the idiot writer of the above-quoted post? People, be kind and give it back to him. The poor critter is suffering.

Photos of New Hair

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Here, as promised, are photos of the new hair:

I’ve been sick plus the photo was taken right after a departmental meeting, hence the tortured look.

And the dramatic rear view:

P.S. People keep asking if I’ve done highlights or a perm. I’ve done nothing but get the hair cut. The color and the curl are completely natural.

Political Stance

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

I’ve been looking for a way to summarize my political beliefs in one neat sentence but couldn’t come up with anything.

Until I found the following statement on somebody else’s blog:

Conservatives may be jerks, but liberals are useless.

This says it perfectly.

30-Day Book Challenge in One Day

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

I found this book challenge at a really great blog. Since I’m such an instant gratification person, I will not spread the challenge out over an entire month but will simply cover it in its entirety in one post. If people want me to expatiate on any of the answers, feel free to say so in the comments.

Day 1: Favorite book.

As a voracious reader, I find it very hard to answer this question. Still, I thought about it and realized that such book exists. I have read it over 15 times and destroyed two copies of it. They simply fell apart because I used them so much. I can recite entire paragraphs from it by heart. As an immigrant to the US, I find that it gave me incredibly useful insights into this country. I have also invented over a dozen of alternative endings to it.

The book I’m talking about is Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

Day 2: Least favorite book.

It says “least favorite book”, not “least favorite trash”, so I will go with an actual work of literature that I find hugely overrated: Tolstoy’s excruciatingly boring War and Peace.

Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud.

Ilf and Petrov’s The Godlen Calf is absolutely one of the funniest books in existence. It’s a masterpiece, people, and it’s available in English.

Day 4: Book that makes you cry.

I read E.L. Voynich’s The Gadfly five times. Every time, I didn’t just cry. I bawled. And it isn’t just me. Everybody who reads it cries. What’s really curious is that everybody cries for a different reason.

Day 5: Book you wish you could live in.

The answer to this question came to me instantly: The Oxford English Dictionary is a place where I want to go after I die.

Day 6: Favorite young adult book.

I’m not familiar with this genre.

Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite

There are dozens, and I can’t select just one. Right now I can recite the primary sources I use for my research. 🙂

Day 8: Book that scares you

Solzhenitsyn’s The GULAG Archipelago is terrifying because it’s all true.

Day 9: Book that makes you sick

Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata is a piece of vile, misogynist garbage that always makes me want to vomit.

Day 10: Book that changed your life

John Fowles’ The Collector. I already explained why in this post.

Day 11: Book from your favorite author

I have a new favorite author every week. Right now, I want to bring to your attention The Same Sea As Every Summer by Esther Tusquets. In the novel, a female professor of literature tries to escape from her ghastly patriarchal marriage and boring bourgeois existence through a lesbian affair with her student. Beautiful language, a very powerful narrative, and it’s based on true events, too.

Day 12: Book that is most like your life

Galdos’s That Bringas Woman hits home on a variety of levels. I don’t feel like being any more explicit right now but that’s my life.

Day 13: Book whose main character is most like you

I identify hugely with Fermin de Pas of Leopoldo Alas’s great novel La Regenta. It isn’t like there are any female characters anywhere one could identify with. Believe me, I’ve been looking forever.

Day 14: Book whose main character you want to marry

A character who is better than my N.? No writer has the kind of an imagination that could create a character that perfect.

Day 15: First “chapter book” you can remember reading as a child

I think it was Oliver Twist, one of Dickens’s weakest novels, which almost put me off the writer permanently.

Day 16: Longest book you’ve read

I think that would be Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in 6 volumes. Make sure you read this unabridged version because there are many editions created by jerkwads who think they are entitled to mess with this beautiful text.

Day 17: Shortest book you’ve read

I have no idea. The shortness of a book is not as memorable as a book’s length.

Day 18: Book you’re most embarrassed to say you like

OK, this isn’t easy to confess, but I really dig Frances Hodgson Burnett, especially her A Little Princess. I discovered the author in adulthood, so it isn’t like I’m driven to like her books by warm and fuzzy childhood memories.

Day 19: Book that turned you on

I remember that 1,001 Nights had a huge erotic impact when I was a child. “What are you reading?” adults would ask. “Fairy-tales,” I would reply, although this book read like real pornography. Of course, you need a non-sanitized, original version.

Day 20: Book you’ve read the most number of times

Vivien by W. B. Maxwell. I blogged about it here. (There is something wrong with “the most number of times”, isn’t it? It doesn’t sound right to me for some reason.)

Day 21: Favorite picture book from childhood

There was this set of really cool books from a Soviet writer of children’s poems that I loved as a kid. And I just discovered that his books are available in English.

Day 22: Book you plan to read next

David Graeber’s Debt. A review is forthcoming.

Day 23: Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)

It puts me to shame to confess this but I skipped huge chunks of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Which means that I lie when I say that I actually read it. God, I hate Joyce.

Day 24: Book that contains your favorite scene

It feels like some of these questions are aimed at people who don’t read a whole lot. Who has just one favorite scene in just one book?

Day 25: Favorite book you read in school

I really liked Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. And when I say that I read it in school, it means that I would hide it under my math textbook and read it surreptitiously during science classes. Then, the teacher would catch me doing it and send an angry missive to my parents. I’d show it to my father who’d say that it made him really proud that I was reading in English instead of wasting my time on “all those pseudo sciences like the silly math, physics, biology, etc.” 🙂 After which, my father and I would both hide the teacher’s report from my mother, a math teacher.

Day 26: Favorite nonfiction book

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique changed my life. Very highly recommended. That’s what feminism is supposed to be about, instead of the toothless “respect my choice to be a doormat in exchange for being kept.”

Day 27: Favorite fiction book

This has already been answered in Day 1.

Day 28: Last book you read

Just finished We Had Won the War by Esther Tusquets.

Day 29: Book you’re currently reading

Book 1 in the Hunger Games Trilogy because a blog reader whose judgment I trust recommended it. A review is forthcoming.

Day 30: Favorite coffee table book

Do I look like a person who is likely to have coffee table books? Let alone, a favorite one? Sheesh, people.