A reader asked me to comment on the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey. I had no idea what it was but now I have studied the issue and am ready to venture an opinion.

The popularity of this book shows that there is a collective fantasy where a significant number of people dreams of overcoming their sexual repression. Readers massively identify with the protagonist and hope that some external force will help them learn to enjoy sex. They are beset by guilt and terror of sex which is why the BDSM component appears.

The artistic quality of the book is non-existent. This is not about art at all. It’s a collective erotic fantasy. I think it’s a very positive phenomenon because this is a significant step forward for a woefully sexually repressed culture.

Another weird habit that my students have is referring to artists as “descriptive.” I’m sick and tired of reading that “Goya is a very descriptive painter,” “Quevedo is a highly descriptive poet,” “Jose Enrique Rodo is a very descriptive essayist,” and “Gaudi is an exceptionally descriptive architect.”

What is it even supposed to mean? Is it something else they bring from high school?

The cashier at the grocery store rings up my donut peaches. You can see them in the photo. They are only called donut for their shape, as you can imagine.

So the cashier, a middle-aged woman of about size 8-10, looks at the peaches and sighs, “Oh, I’d love to buy some. They are incredibly delicious but I can’t let myself have even one.”

“Yes, I know, they are a little pricey,” I complain.

“Oh no, that’s not what I mean,” the woman responds. “I just don’t want to gain weight!”

I had a colleague (yes, an actual academic) who quit eating fruit to lose weight. Then he went on a “McDonald’s Diet.” This means that you eat at McDonald’s 3 times a day and will supposedly end up losing weight because you don’t mix that food with any fresh produce. This is a variation on the Atkins diet.

My colleague ended up at a hospital with a perforated ulcer, by the way.

Seriously, folks, when you hear that giving up on fresh produce will be good for you, does that not make you suspect you are being duped? Why is it so easy to get people to believe stupid things?

A brilliant post denouncing the latest anti-choice strategy adopted by woman-haters. Now they fake interest in the disabled as part of their agenda to invade women’s bodies.

Things have to be going really bad for the Republicans in this electoral campaign if they need to repeat ad nauseam that Obama’s great-grandfather had five wives. I guess there is nothing recent they managed to find on the President. These kinds of articles are always a sign of complete desperation.

An impossibly brilliant post about the annoying aspects of the self-congratulation the geek culture is engaging in.

On literary translation: can an author relinquish control?

University of Virginia is an extremely weird place. Its faculty members are contemplating a strike to protest the ousting of a fat-cat administrator. Something tells me they had nothing whatsoever to say when financial aid to student was cut and the adjuncts were exploited. One has to be quite brainless to place one’s job at risk so that some administrative quack could keep making her humongously overblown salaries. Mind you, these faculty members have not been known to protest the huge salaries bureaucrats draw.

On how the Republicans hate the female soldiers: “If an Army medic serving in Afghanistan is raped and becomes pregnant, she can’t use her military health plan to pay for an abortion. If she does decide to get an abortion, she will have to pay for it with her own money. And if she can’t prove she was raped—which is difficult before an investigation is completed—she may have to look for services off base, which can be dangerous or impossible in many parts of the world.“

Iceland is emerging in a great shape from the crisis.

Judaism is growing more extremist: “Once upon a time simply insisting on wearing a kippah in public was seen as being fanatic.  Once upon a time insisting women wear hats when married at least in shul was seen as dedication.  Now the bar has moved.  Today the Burka Babes are seen as nuts but as Prof. Marc Shapiro sadly points out, it won’t be more than a generation or two before their current idiocy is seen as normative and we are told by all the right spokesmen that, in fact, this is how all Jewish women dressed before the rise of Reform and was always approved by all the right “Gedolim”.  And if the Burka Babes aren’t extreme anymore, one must shudder to think what will occupy the far right side.”

A disappointed Republican leaves his party: “As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies. In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change- a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world- is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans- the notorious birthers- believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them. Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in “class warfare,” but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose- one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget to see that.”

Researchers from Harvard, NYU, and University of Utah publish findings that demonstrate that men married to housewives discriminate against women in the workplace:

In this article, we examine a heretofore neglected pocket of resistance to the gender revolution in the workplace: married male employees who have stay-at-home wives. We develop and empirically test the theoretical argument suggesting that such organizational members, compared to male employees in modern marriages, are more likely to exhibit attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are harmful to women in the workplace. To assess this hypothesis, we conducted four studies with a total of 718 married, male participants. We found that employed husbands in traditional marriages, compared to those in modern marriages, tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) find organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny, more frequently, qualified female employees opportunities for promotion. The consistent pattern of results found across multiple studies employing multiple methods and samples demonstrates the robustness of the findings. We discuss the theoretical and practical import of our findings and suggest directions for future research.

Who’s surprised?

When entire departments of languages and literature get destroyed, when programs of study are slashed, when tenured faculty get fired, when faculty salaries are frozen, when tenure-track jobs get replaced with adjunct positions, nobody gives a rat’s ass.

But when some overpriced useless administrator gets fired, everybody is in an uproar. Like any other administrator is going to be less overpriced and useless.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that only complete blabbering idiots apply business practices to universities (especially the really stupid kind). But I’m bothered by how many posts and articles get dedicated to some administrator who lost her job while nobody wants to write a word about people who matter a lot more to the teaching process, the actual teaching faculty.

I just spoke to a colleague (and a close friend) who shared that, at his university, an effort to introduce a foreign language requirement failed because people don’t see any value in getting students to speak a foreign language in today’s globalized world. Are you seeing any posts on that subject? Not really because who cares that a department of foreign languages at that university is about to die when some super rich administrator will not be able to buy yet another mansion?

Soon, people, soon.

I just thought about it, people, and I realized that I work a lot. Here is how my day usually goes during these summer vacations:

9 am – 10 am – I do my athletic activities and eat oatmeal. What choice  do I have if it’s so horribly hot and I have a tendency to get hypertensive in summer?

10 am -11 am – teach my online course (moderate discussions, answer emails and questions, etc.)

11 am – 12 pm – work on my manuscript

12 pm – 1 pm – lunch and blogging

1 pm – 2 pm – work on my manuscript

2 pm – 3 pm – grade student assignments in my online course

3 pm – 5 pm – do research for my manuscript, look up new sources, read them, organize the bibliography, plan the writing

5 pm – 6 pm – cooking

6 pm – 7 pm – a break

7 pm – 8:30 pm – go for a walk with N.

8:30 pm – 12 am – working on my translation

I think that since I work so hard I should stop feeling guilty about my plan to read the entire Palliser Chronicles by Trollope.

Do you know this joke where a person tells her friend, “I saved a dollar today! I missed the bus so I walked to work.” “I’ll tell you how to save ten bucks instead,” the friend answers. “Next time, you just miss a cab instead of a bus.”

I just discovered that I have been saving tons of money without ever realizing it. I had to buy two glossy magazines, the Bazaar and Elle, for a creative project, and I almost fell over when the cashier told me the price. I could buy a paperback book and a cup of coffee with this money. And all that for a stream of advertisements and absolutely no valuable content at all! Just imagine how much money I would have spent overall if I’d been buying these magazines on a regular basis.

Seriously, since they are purely about advertisement, don’t you think these magazines should be free?

Do you read glossy magazines?

Why is it that I always make huge literary discoveries in the middle of the night and then can’t sleep? I’m reading a forgotten novel by the Russian writer Leskov. The novel is titled At Daggers Drawn and is part of my Classics Challenge.

So I read the novel and discover that it’s extremely similar to Dostoevsky ‘s The Devils. And I mean scarily similar. 

I do an online search and discover that Leskov ‘s novel was published 2 years earlier and Dostoevsky kept reviewing it on every piece of paper he could find.  What does this mean, then? Did Dostoevsky plagiarize his best novel?? We all know the guy was a jerk but at least one could hope he wrote his own stuff.

In case you never heard of Leskov, he is the only Russian writer to create a female character who actually likes sex. Not in the novel I’m reading now but still.