Nothing is more entertaining than observing an older Hispanic male academic at a feminist conference.

On Saturday, I visited a panel at our conference where a female academic was analyzing machismo (sexism) in a Latin American novel.

“Let me explain you what machismo is about!” a fiftyish male academic from Venezuela interrupted her.

We all know how much feminists dig listening to men explain things to them, especially things such as machismo, so everybody fell into a stunned silence.

“Have you ever wondered why the words “machismo” and “mother” start with the same letter?” the male academic continued unperturbed. “Mothers are the root of sexism.”

Given that most of the women in the audience were mothers and that all of us were philologists, the comment did not go over too well.

Does anybody know why people would create such a sticker? Isn’t Sea World an amusement park?

I was at a conference, so I haven’t been able to collect a whole lot of links. Feel free to add any interesting links you like.

War on sex as the reason for Petraeus’s downfall.

Boys do cry: right after vanquishing his opponent at the polls, President Obama slaughters one of the most pernicious gender myths that which is that men don’t have emotions. Just imagine how many health issues could be avoided if men allowed themselves to express their emotions at least once every 4 years.

Yale loses its horrible President Levin but immediately appoints somebody who is not much better. Another fail, Yale!

This is what a nearly perfect request for a recommendation looks like.

A great response to my post on whether communism can be expected to work.

Right-wing meltdown. The problem is that after they melt, they will once again turn solid in the exact same shape and form as before.

A very honest and gut-wrenching personal story about the onset of depression.

A phenomenal show from Colbert. I laughed from beginning to end.

“No, you cannot have your country back. America is moving forward. That’s the message voters sent the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing Tuesday night when they re-elected President Obama and strengthened the Democrats’ control of the Senate. If your idea of America’s power structure is rooted in a 1950s or even a 1920s sensibility, here’s an update: that America is no more. Republicans are trying to hold back a storm surge of demographic change with a white picket fence. Good luck with that.”

 

Mayor Emanuel and Walgreen Co. CEO Greg Wasson announced today a new public-private partnership that creates a pilot incentive program aimed at encouraging parents to become more involved in their schools and part of new efforts CPS is undertaking to better engage parents across the district. The pilot provides parents with a “Balance Rewards” card with 25,000 points, worth the equivalent of $25 in Walgreens in-store purchases, when they pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during Report Card Pick-Up days.

When you have to pay people to take an interest in their own children, the whole situation is too bizarre for words.

Could the Walgreens be persuaded to hand out free birth control instead? A parent who needs to be bribed to remember that s/he has a child will not do any good to that child. I say let’s promote contraception instead.

What do you think?

I really enjoyed this conference, people. Feminists rock. I felt like everybody understood and related to my experience and could offer great advice. I also presented myself in the advice-dispensing capacity while hanging out with graduate students.

I also discovered that my university has very strict research guidelines compared to many other institutions, which confirms my belief that I’m working at the right place. Other places accept book reviews and encyclopedia articles as research, while mine doesn’t even want to look at them. Also, my university doesn’t take into account book contracts or accepted articles, only stuff that has already been published. This made me feel very good.

My talk was very successful and people even asked me to send it to them. And there were so many questions that we had to cut them short because we ran out of time.

To celebrate this successful conference, I’m now at a place called TGI Friday’s that I never visited before but that I know many Americans like. And I’m going to order something called “a whiskey cake” for dessert. I’m writing the post now before the whiskey cake has an effect on me.

As if to prove my point about the similarity between Holocaust deniers and deniers of the crimes of Stalinism, here is a video that made my hair stand on end:

It is especially cute to hear this “professor” say that he spent “many years” researching Stalinism and hasn’t found a single crime that Stalin committed. It’s great that this guy managed to live and do research for many years, even though that his studies have been pretty useless. The Ukrainians who died during the organized starvation, the victims of GULAG, the entire ethnic groups who were slaughtered during Stalin’s genocides did not get a chance to live for all those “many years.” They all died so that this well-fed individual can now stand there and spit on their memory.

Some people have lost all shame.

Dr. Grover Fur should now start applying for grants in Russia. Putin really appreciates efforts to prove that Stalin didn’t kill a single person and practically walked on water.

Thank you, Aaron, for sending me the link.

Jonathan Mayhew has responded to the “What did I give up to be in academia” meme with one of his own. Jonathan’s response is titled “What I Would Have Given Up By Not Being An Academic.” I agree with Jonathan in that the original meme sounds quite skewed without this second part, so here is my contribution to this new meme.

Here are the things I would have lost if I weren’t an academic:

1. Health and sanity. I’m not being coy when I say that no other job would have allowed me to preserve my sanity. I can only function when I can spend a couple of days a week around people and the rest of time on my own. That is how my brain works. Anything else damages me too much. I could have only achieved this schedule outside of academia by working a part-time job, but that would have made me very poor. In my professorial position, I feel both very good financially and stable psychologically.

2. Joy. The happiness I experience when I teach a class or sit down to work on my research is so intense that I don’t have words to describe it. I never used drugs but I think this is what people mean when they refer to “having a high.”

3. Being with people I get. I love my fellow academics because nothing is better than spending your time with people who are obsessed with scholarship, who love reading, who can get extremely passionate about glottal stops or Medieval manuscripts, who are intelligent enough always to have a measure of tactfulness about them, and who get me because they are the same way as I am.

4. Reading. Normally, adults stop reading new books after the age of 31. Only a job like mine gives me the leisure and the excuse to read about 100 new books per year.

5. Prestige. I’m an immigrant with a very Russian-sounding last name. This means that people always look down upon me from the second they meet me. But that only lasts until I mention that I’m a professor of literature with a PhD from Yale with an active research agenda. Even people who don’t understand what a research agenda is begin to treat me as royalty. As an immigrant, I value status a lot.

6. Husband. After my husband lost his job, he ran the risk of being deported within two weeks. However, as an academic, I am entitled to a visa and green-card sponsorship for me and my immediate family. This is something that no other place of employment would have offered me.

7. Security. I don’t have tenure yet, so I can potentially be fired. However, I always get informed of whether my contract will be renewed at a specific time during the academic year. This is a completely different situation psychologically than that of any other employee who can be fired at absolutely any moment and without warning. I have seen what the fear of being fired unexpectedly does to people, and I don’t like it in the least.

8. Vacation time. I have no idea how people manage to survive on 11 vacation days per year. This is a mystery I never want to solve. My academic job gives me a chance to rest, enjoy life, travel. Only this calendar year, I will have traveled to Germany, UK, the Dominican Republic, and Canada. If I can’t travel for fun, then what is the point of such a life?

9. Money. I would not have made the same impressive salary doing anything else in the world. It’s good to know your limitations, so I don’t hold any illusions as to making hundreds of thousands in some mysterious industry. All I know how to do is to read books, talk about books, and write about books. Of course, if no academic job were available, I would have found another way to make money. But  nobody makes a lot when forcing themselves to do things they don’t enjoy.

10. Self-worth. Every day, I receive confirmation that I’m good at what I do, smart, talented, valuable, and necessary. Psychologically, it is very useful. Just imagine the difference between this feeling and dragging yourself to work where you don’t feel like anything special just to make some money.

The really great achievement of this conference will not be my talk. I have given many, and they are always good. This talk has already been accepted for publication, too, so I’m not worried about it.

The really great achievement is that I managed to drag myself to the conference banquet. I never go to these events and, instead, just sit in my hotel room feeling lonely and excluded. I can’t tell you how many times I almost turned back on the way to the banquet. I was feeling nauseous and light-headed and walked swaying from side to side, like a drunken person.

But I managed to get myself there and even had quite a good time socializing with people. Mission accomplished.

After everything that the CIA has fucked up over the last several decades, the director of the CIA resigns over some stupid extramarital affair? That is the biggest crime that the CIA has committed? Jeez. . .

I was at the conference banquet right now, and the American scholars were entertaining themselves by scaring a Spanish writer and her companion with horror stories about the healthcare system in the US.

“So let me see,” the writer’s companion said looking puzzled, “you don’t think that everybody is entitled to good medical care just by virtue of being human and then you all go to church and pray on Sundays?”

At the conference, I met somebody I used to know quite well at my previous university and she didn’t recognize me.

“Emily, don’t you recognize me? It’s me, Clarissa,” I said.

“Oh God!” Emily exclaimed. “You look like a completely  different person!”

“Yes, I cut my hair,” I explained.

“No, this isn’t it,” said Emily pensively. “You just look so . . . happy.”

It’s true that when Emily knew me, I was mopey, miserable, and indifferent. I had no idea one’s state of mind changed one’s appearance so much, though.