I just had a really scary experience. I’m reading a lot about the Franco-era propaganda for my research right now. (A new article is in the works, and the subject will fascinate you when I share it.) My brain works best when there are several sources of information coming at it at the same time. This is why a Russian TV show is on while I’m reading.

So I’m reading about the way the fascist propaganda in Franco’s Spain defined women’s role in society: women are secondary to men, their role is to serve, women are incapable of producing any original thought, they are weak, they need a strong male guidance, women are incomplete human beings, women are inferior to men in terms of intellect and the basic human worth, a woman’s only role is to be an object of male pleasure, etc.

As I read, however, I get the uncanny feeling that the words in front of me are being repeated aloud. I raise my eyes and realize that the host of the Russian TV show is repeating the same things, word for word, and everybody in the audience is agreeing passionately.

The really weird part of this situation is that the female TV star who delivers this fascist anti-women garbage and the absolute majority of her all-female audience are women who have worked their entire lives, who have been the primary bread-winners for their families, who have fed and clothed their non-working or barely-ever-working husbands, who rule their families with an iron fist, and whom you wouldn’t dare to contradict in real life for fear of being chewed down alive and spit out. I saw this very TV host being interviewed with her husband, and the poor guy lives in holy terror of this woman. She obviously doesn’t practice what she preaches but she honestly thinks she does.

When a bunch of fundamentalist housewives gets together and chirps out this stuff, it at least makes some sort of a practical sense. They sell their agency for being fed and clothed, for having an identity they didn’t work to achieve, for being spared the unwelcome need to grow up. It is not the kind of bargain I can understand or approve of, but at least it makes some sort of sense.

What I don’t get about the women in my (Russian-speaking) culture, though, is the sheer impracticality of their willing self-debasement. It is mind-boggling that in the XXIst century women who have have grown up in a society where for the past 95 years all women worked (by all I mean 100%), have been strong, powerful, and active, women would spout the Franco-era garbage of their own free will and for absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever.

P.S. These Russian TV shows I watch have traumatized N.’s feminist soul to such an extent that he started having nightmares. I now have to turn them off whenever he comes home from work because the poor man suffers too badly when he hears all this anti-women crap. I will continue watching, however, because this is an ethnographic phenomenon that needs to be studied.

Three readers have asked me to comment on the story about the Iowa dentist who fired his assistant because he was attracted to her and felt this was jeopardizing his marriage. All I can say, folks, is that I really don’t want to comment because this is a story about weird people doing bizarre things, and it makes no sense to analyze the story where there is too much unexplained weirdness.

The man wanted to save his marriage and this is why he made his extramarital erections a subject of discussion on thousands of blogs, articles, radio shows, and news programs? Does anybody really believe this shit? Of all the strange things people do to save their marriages, creating a very public brouhaha about the exact physiological symptoms of your attraction to somebody other than you spouse seems too outlandish even for Iowans.

The fired assistant is running a close race with the dentist for the prize of the weirdo of the century. She receives sexually charged comments and answers text message from her employer asking how often she orgasms and just takes it in her stride because she “saw him as a mentor”? A mentor in what exactly, if I may ask? And then she goes to court because she wants to keep working in a place where she is harassed and where her presence has become hugely conflictive? Yeah, makes total sense. Of course, it is entirely possible that everything she did (including putting up with harassment) was simply a way of accumulating evidence in order to sue and wrench a good settlement out of him. Which makes the whole story even more disgusting.

I believe that the participants of this brouhaha are lying. For some reason, they need all this drama and exposure and they are very successful in manufacturing interest towards themselves. Maybe the dentist’s business wasn’t doing all that good. Dentists lose a lot of profit in a recession. I know that my dentist is positively desperate to get patients to her office. Alternatively, they might simply be bored. Imagine living in Iowa all your life. You just might get to a point where turning some tawdry office flirtation into a major media event will sound entertaining.

In any case, contrary to what people are suggesting (see linked post), I don’t see any feminist issue here. Just a bunch of weirdos who are probably huge fans of the Jerry Springer show.

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany‘s is the first book on my Classics Club list that has disappointed me. I can’t even say it’s bad because this short novel is too trivial and meaningless to rise to the level of badness. I have absolutely no idea what possessed the author to explore one of the most tired old plots in the history of humanity as late as 1958. Novels narrated by males who are puzzled and attracted / repulsed by a prostitute abound. What is the point of writing yet another one if you can;t contribute anything new to the subject?

I understand, of course, that nobody is likely to invent a new plot these days. But you have got to bring something new even to the most exploited old theme. Capote doesn’t manage to do that, however. He rewrites Abbé Prévost, Kuprin, Zola et al. but his incapacity to rise to their level either artistically or ideologically makes Breakfast at Tiffany‘s nothing but a sad, pale parody.

The book I purchased also contained three short stories, so I decided to read them in order to give Capote a chance to redeem himself in my eyes. And what do you think? The very first story yet again discussed female prostitution in the same saccharine, cloying way as the short novel. I don’t know what made Capote, a gay man, so obsessed with female prostitution but this fixation definitely detracts from the quality of his writing.

If you read the novel and liked it, do share what it is that you enjoyed about it.

I hate to be a Scrooge but I need to share this appalling story or I will explode.

I do everything I can to avoid news about Ukraine because I know that whatever I hear will upset me. But sometimes news from my country of origin manage to seep into my life. Here is the most recent bit of purely Ukrainian idiocy.

My mother writes a column for a Ukrainian newspaper in Canada. As part of her column, she prepared a series of riddles, games, and tales for parents of small children to share with their kids during the seasonal celebrations. The editor of the newspaper then contacted my mother and asked her to remove all references to Grandpa Frost from the column.

Grandpa Frost and his granddaughter Snegurochka are the Slavic equivalent of Santa Claus. They arrive for New Year’s and Christmas (in Russia and Ukraine, Christmas happens after New Year’s), bring gifts for kids, and entertain them around the Christmas tree. In Ukraine, the tradition of welcoming Grandpa Frost is a respected pagan tradition that existed before the forced Christianization of the Slavic people.

As you can imagine, my mother was puzzled by her editor’s suggestion that she remove Grandpa Frost from her column.

“Why on Earth can’t I write about Grandpa Frost?” she asked. “This is a tradition we have been upholding for generations. It is only right that children of the Ukrainian Diaspora should be aware of it.”

“Grandpa Frost is a Stalinist invention,” the editor, who closely follows news from Ukraine, told her. “We deplore Stalin’s oppression of Ukraine and have now adopted St. Nicholas instead of this oppressive Grandpa Frost. Ukraine has now denounced Grandpa Frost and gotten rid of him for good.”

It is always fascinating to see the hopelessly ignorant wave the banner of nationalism. In reality, choosing St. Nicholas over Grandpa Frost only means substituting a long-standing pagan tradition with a more historically recent Christian one which, besides, was never used in Ukraine. Stalin has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of this. Unless he lived in the IV century, he couldn’t have possibly invented Grandpa Frost.

Of course, my mother is not the kind of person who would pay any attention to this kind of stupidity. This is why she told the editor to stop being foolish and quit messing with her column. In a newspaper whose goal is to preserve Ukrainian traditions among the members of the Ukrainian Diaspora, it makes no sense to introduce weird things that are based on nothing but ignorance of history.

Merry Christmas, folks! Don’t let any officious ignoramus mess with your traditions and celebrations.

Remind me never to buy anything from Sephora online ever again. I wanted to treat myself to something nice for Christmas and ordered my favorite Dior mascara. It arrived right in time for Christmas, which is good, but look at how it was packaged. A big box stuffed full of paper. I had to rummage in it for a while to fish out the small tube of mascara. Mascara isn’t fragile, so it makes zero sense to waste all that paper and cardboard on shipping it. Now, instead of feeling happy about my purchase, I feel guilty about wasting all this paper.

Now, I believe, is a good time to continue our discussion of modernism. The Great War taught the people who survived it to see the world as a scary, incomprehensible place. The belief that science and technology would improve everybody’s lives was shattered when not only tanks but also biological and chemical weapons were used in the war for the very first time in the history of humanity. The war was incomprehensible, its motives and consequences confusing. So many people had died, and for what? In 1918, very few of the survivors could say that the war had been worth the sacrifice, the deaths, and the suffering.

The great realist project of explaining the world with the goal of transforming it had to be abandoned. Artists were as lost and confused as anybody else. After you see the massive destruction of a world war, it isn’t easy to believe that a great novel will, indeed, achieve a profound change in the way people live. The feelings of loss, confusion, and impotence brought by the war did not constitute a break with the years immediately before it. Already at the end of the XIXth century, there was a growing sensation that the world was becoming too complicated and dangerous. The World War contributed to the feelings that already existed and magnified them.

So if artists saw no more reason to create meaningful content, what remains? The answer is obvious: form. Modernist art strives to create an original, beautiful, exquisite form and mostly abandons the task of explaining what the increasingly complicated and confusing world is like.

See, for instance, a poem titled “Rain” by Guillaume Apollinaire:

 

The poem is visually striking. It defies our expectations as to what a poem should be like. And here lies the most important contribution of the modernist writers. Unlike their predecessors, they don’t strive to provide answers. More often than not, they don’t even pose any questions for us to answer. Instead, they offer us – the readers, the spectators – an opportunity to formulate our own questions and look for answers on our own. A modernist work of art requires that the reader / spectator invest as much effort into  creating it. Without our active participation, this work of art will simply not happen. In case this sounds confusing, here is the perfect example:

 

Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” demonstrates perfectly what modernist art is all about. The first time you see the painting, you feel annoyed.

“What?!? What the hell is this?” you ask. “This guy is crazy if he thinks I will agree to consider this art!”

If you are a lazy, stupid person, you will stop right there, walk away, and never try to approach modernist art again. If, however, you are not entirely averse to intellectual exertion, you will eventually get over your annoyance and start asking questions.

“Why does this bother me? What did I expect this painting to be? What is my definition of a work of art and where does the conviction that this isn’t what art should be like come from? What are my expectations and how did they arise? What is the role of an artist? What is my role? Why did nobody paint this way before? And what can the future of art be after this?”

This painting that seems like one huge fraud at first can produce a plethora of insights if you give it a chance. This is the art of people who don’t expect to sit there passively and be entertained and / or brainwashed. This is the art of thinking individuals who strive to formulate their own approach to everything they encounter. Is it any wonder, then, that the totalitarian Soviet regime banned all modernist art and everything that resembled it?

[To be continued. . .]

In the early days of this blog, I had a tradition of ridiculing Ross Douthat, NYTimes‘s most useless columnist, every Monday. In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, Douthat has come up with a response so idiotic that I decided to restore the good ole Douthat-bashing times and use this hapless journalist’s column for my translation series. In the series, I explain what people are really saying with their dishonest articles and blog posts.

Here is how Douthat begins his piece titled “Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void”:

FOR a week after the Newtown shooting, the conversation was dominated by the self-righteous certainties of the American center-left.

Translation: “I’m a completely cynical individual who believes that everybody is motivated to live, breathe, write, speak, and emote by the desire of money and fame. I’m too intellectually limited to realize that this is nothing but my projection of my own driving forces. This is why I believe it’s appropriate to address a tragedy with whining about getting less chances to be in the spotlight that others. The only person who should be spouting self-righteous certainties is me. Me, me, me.”

In print and on the airwaves, the chorus was nearly universal: the only possible response to Adam Lanza’s rampage was an immediate crusade for gun control, the necessary firearm restrictions were all self-evident, and anyone who doubted their efficacy had the blood of children on his hands.

Translation: “I’m so used to yelling “baby murderers!” every five seconds as part of my anti-choice crusade that I have convinced myself that everybody else uses the death of children as a rhetorical device as easily as I do. For immoral people like myself, the only possibility of being at peace with ourselves is by believing that everybody is as rotten as we are.”

The leading gun control chorister was Michael Bloomberg, and this was fitting, because on a range of issues New York’s mayor has become the de facto spokesman for the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite.

Translation: “All of my fake concern about fetuses, however, only serves to mask my profound indifference towards children. Of course, sometimes the mask slips off, and everybody gets to see that airing some minor grievances against somebody who has nothing whatsoever to do with the tragedy I claim to be addressing is a lot more important to me than discussing the dead children. Remember, I’m a proud anti-choice woman-hater. This means that I’m congenitally incapable of caring two straws about children.”

The entire Obama era has been shaped by this conflict, and not for the good. On issue after issue, debate after debate, there is a near-unified establishment view of what the government should do, and then a furious right-wing reaction to this consensus that offers no real policy alternative at all.

Translation: “Finally, I can drop the pretense of talking about these boring dead kids and discuss what really bothers me. Namely, how come the wonderful me-me-me has ended up wrong on absolutely everything I ever predicted in my columns for years and have become a laughing stock with my moanings about the “libertine Sex and the City,” my gushings over the huge social value of tabloid journalism, and insistence that community service is a great substitute for sex. Since I’m too infantile to take responsibility for anything, I make a solemn oath to blame Obama for everything that upsets me in life for as long as I shall live, amen.”

What’s missing, meanwhile, are real alternatives — not only conservative, but left-wing as well. On national security, the left has essentially disappeared, sitting on its hands while President Obama embraces powers every bit as imperial as those his predecessor claimed.

Translation: “In the aftermath of the last presidential election, it has become painfully obvious that my political party is in a deep crisis. As a profoundly dishonest and immature person, however, I cannot recognize this. Instead, I choose to pretend that the winners are suffering from the same kind of crisis. This will allow me and my peers to avoid taking stock of our mistakes and changing our agenda in order to make our party more relevant.”

I just found this great collection of photos showing how the world’s major cities would look without human-made lights.

Seeing it made me value human civilization even more.

I named my sister after a brand of kitchen appliances. Yes, that sounds a little bit too out there even for me but let me explain.

When my mother became pregnant with my sister, she put me in charge of selecting a name for the baby. This was a genius pedagogic move. For a beloved, worshiped, center-of-the-universe child like me, an appearance of a sibling who was going to take away the spotlight could have easily caused resentment and sibling rivalry. By letting me choose the baby’s name, however, my mother laid the foundation of a different kind of relationship between me and my sister. Even before she was born, the baby wasn’t a competitor for me. She was going to need my protection and care. I highly recommend this strategy to anybody whose children have a noticeable age difference. (Here, here, and here are some more suggestions as to how to promote a beautiful relationship between siblings.) Yes, you might end up with the name that doesn’t make you 100% happy but isn’t that a tiny price to pay for a life-long friendship between siblings?

When you are 5, it isn’t that easy to choose a name for a baby because you don’t know that many names. I read a lot at that age but mostly fairy tales and works by Alexander Dumas. Of course, I knew even then that naming a Soviet child Gretel, Budur or Constance Bonacieux would not do. It was very important to me that the baby’s name was not shared by anybody I knew. It had to be original and not make it seem like we were naming her after somebody in our circle of acquaintance.

Once, I was sitting in the kitchen, pondering this important issue. Suddenly, I noticed that the kitchen stove had its brand name written in the bottom right corner. That brand name was a beautiful woman’s name that nobody I knew shared. The decision was made instantly, and now my sister proudly carries the name of our kitchen stove. As good luck may have it, this name is very easy for  English-speakers and Spanish-speakers to pronounce. It’s also very beautiful and meaningful.

It would be very rewarding to have an unusual experience of reading news from Ukraine that are not completely disheartening and disgusting. But that doesn’t meant to be, it seems. I just discovered that last month there was a flare-up of anti-semitism in Ukraine. A recently elected member of Ukrainian Parliament (a.k.a  the freak show of the century) declared that actress Mila Kunis is a dirty Jew (he used a less polite word, of course) who should stick the Star of David up hers (I’m providing a literary translation of colloquialisms here) and stop mentioning her country of origin. (Here is a link but it’s in Russian.)

The really ridiculous part of this is that today’s anti-Semitism in Ukraine is directed at a group that is no longer there. The absolute majority of Ukrainian Jews left the country a while ago. Maybe a few especially tenacious ones remain, although I wonder what possesses them to do so. Historically, countries that make all the Jews leave never fare too well economically, scientifically, or culturally. Ukraine should remember that. After an unparalleled history of promoting the rights of Jews as an integral part of creating the first independent Ukrainian Republic, it is a shame to see this happening in Ukraine today.

P.S. Anybody who tries to leave a comment about anti-Semitism supposedly being more widely spread in Ukraine than anywhere else should know that s/he is being an ignorant fool who is parroting the nasty Soviet anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Just go away already, comrade.