I just read this post from a fellow library lover who asks whether libraries are dying out as places that not only store knowledge but also offer a space for quiet, uninterrupted, slow contemplation:

Over the past fifty five years, since I first entered the University of Nottingham as an undergraduate student, university libraries have always played a central role in my life.  The moment I enter one of those libraries, I feel at home. The sweet sense of silence that always greets me, in a world of largely senseless noise, is a tonic to my  soul.

I know exactly what this academic means. Libraries are like small temples where you can immerse yourself in an environment that can hardly be repeated anywhere else.

This gave me an idea for a new series of posts. Everywhere I travel, I will visit a library, take photos of it, and write a post on it. This will be my tribute to libraries and to everything I gained from my relationship with them.

People urgently need to catch up on their grade school science education* to avoid coming up with weird statements like these:

It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

The suggestion that a high social standing or a huge amount of money somehow make a man’s sperm more likely to produce a male baby is so bizarre that it makes me wonder whether the author has been skipping his anti-psychotic medication. Coupled with the comments about women’s bodies being incapable of conception during rape, I’m starting to get worried about the future of this nation.

Of all the reasons to vote or not vote for a candidate, the gender of their children is among the most idiotic ones. I understand that many people are too dumb to develop opinions on politics and economy. This makes them look for more understandable ways of managing the complexities of our shared social reality. My question is: why do we, people who actually possess working brains, have to be exposed to the arrant idiocy of these losers? If they aren’t even smart enough to pick up a book on human reproduction for 3-year-olds (of the kind that say things like, “When Mommy and Daddy really like each other and want to make a baby. . .”), then they should just shut the fuck up and listen to people who are not complete idiots.

For shame, people. This is the XXI century. We can all read, there is an unprecedented access to all kinds of information. We should not be reading and discussing this kind of egregious ignorance in this day and age. Our Medieval ancestors are laughing at us from their graves. This election cycle is bringing out really weird things. And this is still August. I’m afraid to imagine what we will see and hear come October.

On the positive side, I once again want to remind you of my prediction that we are witnessing the agony of the ultra-conservative fanatically religious movement in this country. It is flailing and thrashing because its days are numbered and it is well aware of that. After it dies out, we fill finally see an intelligent, reasonable, logic-loving and educated Conservative movement. We will disagree with it but we will be able to respect it and listen to its views with interest. I know I said this before but I feel that this kind of reassurance is needed.

* Yes, I know there is no grade school science education. And that is precisely the problem.

I’m trying to explain to my students (in Spanish) what “El turno pacifico” means*.

“Imagine, for example, that Obama and Romney get together and decide that, OK, to hell with the elections, we’ll just agree to hand the power over to each other every 4 years, and the votes can be falsified to make those results look legitimate. This is pretty much what happened with Spain’s “Peaceful Turn.”

“Ah! I knew this!” a student exclaims.

“What?” I ask.

“I knew the system in this country is completely corrupt! It makes no sense to go to the polls in November because the results are already predetermined.”

“No, no,” I say, horrified. “I was talking about Spain in the early XXth century. Not the US. You should definitely vote in November. The elections are real.”

“Yeah, right,” the student scoffs.

I think I should stop giving contemporary examples to avoid making students even more suspicious of the political process than they already are.

* “After almost a whole century of political instability and many civil wars, the aim of the Restoration was to ensure political stability in Spain. Under this plan, El Turno Pacífico (or “The Peaceful Turn”) was a system . . . whereby the two “official” parties . . . alternated in power. Its key features were that the government would first be chosen by the king and would then “make” the election, ensuring victory. After a period in office, it would then be the turn of the opposition. The Turno Pacifico excluded all other parties from the possibility of victory. This was achieved by electoral fraud: caciques in most constituencies would instruct their clients how to vote. . . It lacked a responsiveness to popular opinion as (until about 1914) the outcome was broadly decided in advance.”

Voxcorvegis cites a very weird study in the field of political psychology that says the following:

Liberals reported greater openness, whereas conservatives reported higher conscientiousness. This means that liberals (at least in their own estimation) saw themselves as more creative, flexible, tolerant of ambiguity, and open to new ideas and experiences. Across the political personality divide, conservatives self-identified as more persistent, orderly, moralistic, and methodical.

OK, let’s use me as a case in point. I don’t mind confessing (because everybody has noticed this already, I’m sure) that I’m inflexible to the point of rigidity, incapable of entertaining or appreciating ambiguity, endlessly moralizing, extremely judgmental, persistent like a bulldog, and thrive on order and routine. As much as I’d like to see myself as creative, flexible and tolerant, there is too much self-delusion that needs to happen for me to have this image of myself. Yet I’m a Liberal of the kind that condemns President Obama for being too conservative for my tastes.

But wait, there is more:

Evidence suggests that these personality differences between liberals and conservatives begin to emerge at an early age. A 20-year longitudinal study by Jack and Jeanne Block showed that those who grew up to be liberals were originally assessed by their preschool teachers as more emotionally expressive, gregarious, and impulsive when compared to those who became conservatives, who were considered more inhibited, uncertain, and controlled.

We don’t have any of my childhood teachers reading the blog but we do have people who knew me at 4, 5, 6, etc. They will confirm for you that, as a child, I was painfully shy, extremely inhibited, and silent. The music teacher I had at the age of 6 told my mother that I would probably grow up to be a serial killer because my lack of affect was sociopathic. (The word “autism” was unknown at that time.)

At the same time, my sister, who is and always was gregarious, emotionally expressive, impulsive, creative, flexible, tolerant of ambiguity, and open to new ideas and experiences in a way I could never hope to be, consistently votes Conservative back in Canada.

Obviously, this is anecdotal evidence but the descriptions of the liberals and conservatives offered in the article make no sense to me. Is political psychology even a legitimate field?

I don’t believe in casual sex. I mean I don’t believe it exists. We can tell ourselves as many times as we want, “Oh, this will be completely casual because this is precisely the kind of person I always said I’d never date and, besides, I’m moving into another country in 15 minutes.” And then you find yourself married to this person, living with him in Southern Illinois, and fantasizing about walking around the assisted living facility, holding hands with him 50 years from now. In the meanwhile, your friends are peeing themselves with laughter because of all the times you ranted about the impossibility of limiting yourself to a single person even for one year, let alone a lifetime.

While we try to control reality with our labels and categories, life happens.

I find it especially cute when brainless who idiots feel vaguely disturbed by my posts but are prevented from responding to them by a deplorable lack of brain matter start mewling incoherently in response. Here is a recent example of such impotent blabbering on the subject of my post on why FEMEN and Pussy Riot have nothing to do with feminism:

I agree strongly with Clarissa that these issues need to be addressed, and that “There is a dire need in these countries for a feminist movement that will create a different narrative.” We differ greatly, however, on what that means.  In my mind, simply being a woman with an opinion, and voicing that opinion so loudly that it can’t be ignored, is a feminist act.

If this weird creature’s mind were a little bit less empty than it is right now, s/he might have found an opportunity to learn a thing or two about the countries s/he feels entitled to discuss. Ukrainian and Russian women are not and haven’t been for almost a century wilting flowers, terrified of voicing our opinions. If you believe we are, it means that you are trying to analyze our reality through the prism of your own cultural stereotypes, which is ignorant and offensive.

Right before I found this pathetic outpouring of idiocy on the subject of Russian and Ukrainian women, I was watching a TV program on the most popular channel in Russia. The show’s host, a brilliant, ultra-successful, intellectual woman, was saying that a woman’s only true sphere is the kitchen, women who privilege their careers over marriage and babies are defective, childless women are freaks, and feminists are pathetic shrews who haven’t managed to get anybody to fuck them properly. She was saying it in a very self-assured, confident way and her female co-hosts (brilliant,  ultra-successful, intellectual women) supported her passionately. In terms of how loudly these women defended their opinions, there is not a single TV personality of the female gender in North America who even comes closely to them. However, there is nothing feminist about what they said or the fact that they said it.

In our countries, we grow up listening to women speak. In the classroom, at school, in college, on television, on the Internet, in public spaces and at home, we hear women voicing their beliefs loudly, passionately, and relentlessly. Starting from 1st grade, teachers have to work hard to make the female students shut up for a second and get the silent, mumbling male students to say anything. I already told on this blog the story of how shocked I was when, at the age of 22, I became a student at a Canadian university and heard my male colleagues make comments in class. I wouldn’t have been more disturbed had I heard the chairs and the door participate in the discussion because, in my experience, men never spoke in class and you had to push them hard to make them voice any opinion in any context.

What is a huge feminist achievement (yip-dee-doo, women managed to have an opinion and got somebody to hear them!) for people in one country, is a matter of course for those who come from a different culture. This is why it’s always best to try to learn something about other cultural realities before blabbering stupidly about them.

P.S. Every two weeks or so, somebody publishes a silly anti-Clarissa rant. What happens after that never changes. Readers from the anti-Clarissa resource come over to my blog, read the referenced post, then become curious and read more posts, then read the entire blog from the beginning, and finally become permanent readers. So, if you want to bellyache about being offended by my opinions and send me your readers, feel free. Just remember that whenever you babble ignorantly about my culture, I will get on your case and tear you to shreds. You know why? Because we are a culture of very outspoken, loud, and brash women.

I hope this unintelligent detractor manages to celebrate my belief that s/he is a vapid fool as a deeply feminist act.

In class, I say:

“By the 1890s, Spain was a crumbling old Empire that was barely managing to hold on to the remnants of its imperial possessions. However, at this time, there was a country that had accumulated enough economic and military resources to enable it to declare its intentions to become the new world power. This country attacked the Spanish Empire in a highly symbolic gesture that inaugurated the beginning of a new world order. This country would become a new empire that will dominate the politics of the XXth century with its imperial aspirations. What country am I talking about?”*

The only students in both sections who knew the answer had names like Esteban Garcia and Josefina Vasquez. The rest of the students suggested Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Draw your own conclusions.

* I know the language sounds bombastic and very different from the way I normally speak. But the lecture was in Spanish, and I’m trying to translate what I said as closely as possible to the original.

This is the last post of the kind for today, I promise.

“The most important events of the XXth century were the two World Wars and the invention of the color TV.”

“The decade of the 60s is mostly known for how many drugs were taken.”

“The most important events of the XXth century were the revolutions in China and Iran.” (I agree they were important but why these two specifically? I now really wonder what the student’s Major is.)

“The Beatles were one of the most important phenomena of the century.” (Hear, hear!)

And the absolute winner: “The most important thing in the XXth century is Feminism because it changed the world for the better!!”

P.S. For those who keep worrying: in this particular assignment, I only grade the use of Spanish. Opinions are neither castigated nor rewarded.

I just found a huge cultural difference between me and my students. They think that one of the most crucial events of the XXth century was the walk on the Moon. To me, this makes zero sense. It wasn’t even the first trip into outer space. And who cares, anyway? As of now, space exploration has not led to anything significant and has proven to be a major waste of money.

I attribute this to the success of the Cold War propaganda that, I’m guessing, probably touted the walk on the Moon as something hugely important to mask the frustration of lagging behind the Soviet Union in every aspect of space exploration.

Based on this and on the Princess Diana comment, I’m starting to get a feeling that my students fail to grasp the difference between the sensational or the hyped up and the truly important.

“One of the most important events of the XXth century was the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl.”

Of course, the student has a Polish last name, which makes the entire thing less surprising. But still.