I keep obsessively reading the reviews of the resort where I will be going the day after tomorrow (because I can’t enjoy the trip until I have tortured myself with every nightmarish scenario possible, of course.) Almost every single review mentions that people in the Dominican Republic speak Spanish and their English is far from perfect. The sense of outrage these tourists experience when they realize that not everybody in the world is an English-speaker is bizarre, to put it mildly.

Yet some universities refuse to introduce the language requirement or to raise it from one year to two. I maintain that any university that allows students to graduate without speaking a second language scams its graduates. A monolingual person with a scholarly degree is a joke.

Even the supposedly progressive sources can’t avoid using hugely offensive language when discussing women. The “What About Teh Menz” blog started out kind of fine, but it has adopted the language of disrespect for women that makes me cringe. Here, for example, the kind of dating advice that its author dispenses to short men:

Let your girlfriend wear high heels if she wants to.

In this blogger’s confused sad excuse for a brain, adult women need their boyfriend’s permission to wear the shoes they like.

I’m sure that many of that blog’s followers are wondering why their personal lives are miserable. The answer is, of course, that as long as they see this kind of rhetoric as acceptable, their loneliness will only intensify. Nobody needs a man who thinks he will be “letting” his girlfriend do things. Even the most downtrodden, mousy females have realized by this time that they don’t need their boyfriends’ permission to dress the way they want to. There can be any number of boyfriends in a woman’s life. But none of them can matter more than her dignity.

Unfortunately, Google Reader doesn’t allow me to bump blogs off my reading list, so I’m doomed to reading the idiocies of this stupid blog in my blogroll.

OK, time for another riddle, people.

Everybody knows that machine translation systems are useless when translating fiction. However, there was one scene in the novel I’m translating that I knew would be translated perfectly by Google Reader. I tried it and it turned out I was absolutely right. The translation of the scene required almost no retouching after it came out of Google Translator.

Question: what kind of a scene was it and why did Google Translator translate it so perfectly?

Canada always had very good policies of governmental support for research. However, the assault on learning, knowledge, and research in Canada continues.

Here is what a Canadian scientist has to say about this:

Today, scientists in this country got out and did what has needed to be done for years now: hundreds of them, clad in white lab coats, ventured to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to protest the Harper Regime’s policies on scientific issues–policies which, in sum total, amount to nothing short of an ongoing, insane crusade against the very idea of objectively verifiable facts.

I feel very sad about what is going on in Canada. What a shame!

What was it that possessed the Canadians to vote for Harper? The guy is so dumb that his head must be completely hollow.

I will be coordinating the research projects of our graduating Seniors next year (for the first time ever! Yes, yes, yes!) and the students have started writing in already because they want to start working on their projects as soon as possible.

It always fascinates me to observe how our students change in the four (or five, or sometimes six) years they spend getting a university education. They come in as listless, indifferent, ignorant Freshmen who have no knowledge about the world and no interest in learning about it. Politics bores them, literature terrifies them, traveling does not excite them.

By the time they are ready to leave, our students become curious, engaged, intelligent people who have traveled, who have learned to speak a foreign language, who have opinions, who care about politics, and who maybe even like to read. This is especially obvious during the Senior Assignment presentations. You look at a student and think, “Gosh, I remember her when she couldn’t say a word of Spanish and just sat there looking all petulant in class. And now she is sharing the results of her analysis of a novel (a film, a work of philosophy, a social issue, etc.)  in beautifully fluent Spanish!”

What we do for our students is hugely important. We give them the tools they need to start caring about the world and engaging with it. It feels like we put a battery in them. Where there used to be indifference and listlessness, we create excitement and enthusiasm. This is an extremely rewarding job, people.

My mother’s friend, let’s call her Arina, is from St. Petersburg. Arina is over sixty and is very interested in everything health-related. She kept noticing TV and radio commercials that advertised the services of a branch of an Israeli clinic in Russia. The commercials offered a free medical check-up to anybody interested in the clinic’s services.

Arina called the clinic and scheduled a phone interview. The next day she called my mother in Montreal.

“I have horrible news,” Arina said, crying. “I had a medical examination at this clinic and they say that I’m very sick. I have this huge blood clot located between the two hemispheres of my brain. It can burst at any moment and I will die instantly! The doctors say I need to get operated immediately because I’m on the brink of death!”

My mother was  horrified. She had no idea her friend was this sick.

“Just make sure you seek a second opinion, OK?” she told Arina.

Several days later, Arina told her friend that everything was good.

“I should have suspected that there was something fishy about this so-called Israeli clinic from the start!” she chirped happily.

“What do you mean?” my mother asked.

“Well, it’s the way they conducted the medical examination,” Arina explained. “They did it over the phone.”

“How did they discover a blood clot over the phone?”

“They called me, asked me to sit by the window and breathe in deep. Then they kept asking questions over the phone. After that, they told me I had a clot and needed to give them $4,000 to have it removed.”

Unfortunately for us and our curiosity and fortunately for her wallet, Arina realized this was a scam before she had a chance to find out whether the blood clot was going to be removed over the phone as well.

One of the hardest lessons for us to learn when the wild capitalism stage began in 1990 was that we now needed to think for ourselves, make choices, be responsible for our lives all the time. That was a harsh burden. In the Soviet Union, we pretty much had our lives charted out for us and the variations were minimal. Now we had all these choices coming at us from every direction. That seemed cool at first. But then we realized that every choice came with responsibility attached. Before, we could just sit there and blame the government for everything that went wrong. And now, if we messed up, we only had ourselves to blame.

I guess we could use this true story to define our political stances according to who we see as the guilty party here: the woman who believes that a blood clot can be diagnosed over the phone, the fake clinic that preys on the ignorance and fears of customers, or the government that doesn’t step in to manage their relationship.

P.S. Before you start condemning Arina as silly, you need to know that she used to be a Chair of a department at one of Russia’s prestigious universities.

I just read this very insightful analysis of the obsession with female virginity in YA literature. It isn’t just YA literature that is obsessed with this topic either. The entire genre of romance and erotica shares this fixation. So why does that happen? Why is there such an obsessive interest in the mythical hymen that most women do not even possess?

Given that women constitute the majority of readers interested in these books, we have to conclude that women, not men, are the ones obsessed with female virginity*. The reason for that, I believe, is how unhappy most women are with their sex lives. Many women trade sexual desire for an opportunity to be in a relationship with a great guy who suits them in every aspect except sexually.

The obsessive return to the topic of virginity is, for these women, an opportunity to go back to the beginning of their sex lives in search of the moment where it all went wrong. They have a vague feeling that somehow sexuality does not work for them the way it should. The repetitive return to the origins of that misery is an attempt to engage in a symbolic recreation of their own first sexual experience in the hopes that a “perfect” loss of virginity would result in a great sex life.

Of course, this project never works. Once the patriarchal conditioning that prevents a free and happy exercise of female sexuality is put in place, once the relational and / or sacrificial model of sexuality is adopted, only a massive amount of hard work will enable a woman to get rid of these impediments.

Replaying one’s first sexual encounter and attempting to create a fantasy in its place will not help. On her road to sexual liberation, a woman needs to go much earlier in time to find the moment when her physiology was taken hostage by the patriarchal conditioning.

* I’m talking exclusively about the developed Western societies in this post.

I’m teaching all new courses next year which makes me really happy. There are few things I enjoy more than developing new courses. One of them will be “Culture of Contemporary Spain.” This is how I decided to structure the course.

It will be broken up into eight segments:

1. History.
2. Literature.
3. Film.
4. Politics.
5. Languages.
6. Nationalisms.
7. Economy.
8. Music.

As we go through these subjects, we will read (the course is conducted in Spanish, of course):

a) Poetry by:

• Juan Ramon Jimenez. I don’t like him all that much but he is an absolute smashing success with students. For some reason, they can’t get enough of JRJ, so I teach him to make them happy.
• Federico Garcia Lorca. I’ve been reading so much criticism by Jonathan Mayhew that teaching Lorca has become unavoidable. I have never taught this poet before and I have no idea how the students will like him.
• Maria Victoria Atencia. Another poet that students adore. I already know that half of the final essays in the course will be on her poetry.
• Jose Angel Valente. I’m still working on the selection.

There is space for a couple more poets in the course, so any suggestions are welcome.

b) Prose by:

• Almudena Grandes. We will read a selection from her most recent novel.
• Carmen Martin Gaite.
• Ana María Matute.
• Antonio Muñoz Molina. We will read an article of his on how we should not allow religious fanatics to shut us up. It will fall right before the elections, too. Hee hee hee.
• Espido Freire.

I’m still looking for at least three more authors. I’m thinking, maybe something by Javier Marias. He’s hugely popular, and I’d like the students to know who he is.

You have no idea how hard it is for me to choose just a few from all the amazing writers I know.

We will also watch two films:

• Mondays in the Sun
• Barrio

This seems like an unorthodox choice, given that both films are by the same director, Fernando León de Aranoa. But what can I do if he’s the only director in Spain who makes works of art today instead of producing Hollywood-style trash? Of course, we could watch Pan’s Labyrinth, like everybody else does, but how boring is that? Also, Aranoa’s films work perfectly with my course material. Mondays in the Sun features Javier Bardem when he was still a good actor, not a Hollywood lap dog.

I still haven’t started working on the music section of the course. I will only have 4 lecture days to deal with music, so this needs to be planned carefully. Any suggestions?

I’m sorry if this post is boring. I find it helpful to list these things here to assist me in my planning. Somehow, things don’t seem just as real until I see them in the format of a blog post.

If it seems like I’m missing something, or if things don’t make a lot of sense, feel free to comment.

I’m shaking in anticipation because of how much I want to teach this course. This will be a fantastic experience. No PowerPoints will appear in the vicinity of the classroom. Not a word of English will be spoken. We will do tons of writing. Oh the joy, the happiness of a new course!

There is a new page on the blog that I added last night. It is called “Ask Clarissa.”

Thanks to reader Matt who suggested this.