I’m following through on my resolution to watch the movies on my list of the best Spanish films of all times. Today I watched Even the Rain (También la lluvia), a 2010 movie by the famous Spanish director Icíar Bollaín. She is supposed to be this ultra-amazing movie maker but I’m very unimpressed by this film.

Bollaín is obviously very desperate to be noticed by Hollywood. As a result, she creates a product that follows every convention of the worst and cheapest flicks Hollywood ever produced.The movie is very heavy-handed in its treatment of the story. The mean, greedy producer from Spain turns out to be a deadbeat father. His antagonist, a noble leader of indigenous protesters, is, of course, an amazing father. A famous actor is a falling down drunk. An idealistic young movie director discovers that his compassion towards the indigenous people is nothing but a pose. A cynic turns out to be more compassionate than an idealist. The greedy producer is redeemed by his desire to save a little girl. And guess what? He arrives “just in time” to save her. One minute longer, and she would have died. Isn’t that horribly convenient?

This director also has no idea how to work with actors. She takes two phenomenally talented actors, Luis Tovar and Gabriel García Bernal, and doesn’t manage to utilize them in a way that would make their talent come through. The use of music and slow-motion sequences are nauseatingly predictable. Every scene, every move, even the inflections of the actors’ voices made me feel like I’d seen this movie a hundred times before. And I don’t even see that many movies.

Ideologically, the movie is an embarrassing failure. The point of the film is that even those people from the 1st world who pretend to care about the struggles of the indigenous folks only want to use them for their own gains. However, this is exactly what Bollaín does with her movie, too. The protests of the indigenous people in Bolivia are only worthy of her attention inasmuch as they can be used to allow her rich Western viewers to wallow in pleasing self-flagellation.

In short, I was not surprised to discover that this crapola was selected as one of the finalists for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Movie category. Icíar Bollaín was obviously filming for the sole purpose of getting this nomination. I have no idea why I always hear about this director at scholarly conferences. I haven’t seen her other movies but this is commercial garbage of the worst caliber.

P.S. Even the Rain is available on Netflix with English subtitles.

I just finished a long and tortuous translation about turbine oil, so I decided to entertain myself by reading my blogroll. And this is the very first thing I encountered:

Basically, being a hunter-gatherer is about as good as it gets for most of human existence. . . Industrial society produces better medicine and goods, but we work harder and have vastly more chronic disease even at the same age, and industrial society includes as its concommitent things like the widespread rape in the Congo and African poverty: that’s a requirement of our society, is not incidental.

Forget about the idiocy of what he says, just look at how horrible the writing is. Do I not get enough of this crap from my Freshmen?

Can somebody tell me why I’m following this pompous fool? I know, it’s because I’m what this post’s title says I am.

Dear Dame Eleanor Hull,

thank you for the card you send me with the words of kindness and compassion. I got it right when I needed some extra support. This was the first time I ventured onto campus, so this was a very difficult moment.

Thank you, dear friend.

For my return to campus, I have chosen the most unrelieved black I could find in my closet, complete with a black headband with black ribbons, a black handbg, black shoes, and even a black notebook I’m carrying in my hand. If people don’t clock on to what this means and don’t just let me be, I don’t know what else can be done.

I have already scared the postman when I opened the door to sign for a package. Now it’s time to traumatize everybody on campus. I’m trying to handle this with a degree of levity to relieve the stress, if you haven’t guessed.

My yearly ethics training just informed me that there is no penalty or retaliation for whistleblowing. Do the creators of the test realize how stupid they look at this particular moment?

The most difficult thing is doing stuff for “the first time since everything happened”, which is how I put it to myself. Today I will go to campus for the first time since. I know from experience that it’s doable. Everything is doable. But oh, it’s hard.

It has to be done because I will go back to work on November 4 and I need to get used to being back on campus before then. It will not do to be an emotional wreck as I walk into the classroom. Teaching is exercising control, and how can one exercise control over others when not being in control of oneself?

I just stole the following list of writing mistakes from Undine’s blog. Sorry, Undine, I just really like it and I couldn’t control myself.

Let’s see which of these things I do on a regular basis.

• Basically. Why is it basic, and if it’s basic, why do you have to tell the reader it’s basic? I don’t do this and I HATE it when students do. For some reason, they seem to adore their “basically”s and “actually”s.
• Also. Go ahead–I dare you to do this: copy & replace every “also” with nothing (I say to myself).  Does it make a difference? If it does, you didn’t need it. I don’t do “also”, but I’m very enamored of “at the same time.” Do you, folks, believe it is as bad as overusing “also”?
• In particular. Can’t you see that it’s a particular example? I don’t do this.
• Attempts to serve as, attempts to prove.  It does or it doesn’t. Get off the fence and make this a more definite verb. God, I do this all the time. But Undine is right, this is bad, weak writing. I need to let it go.
• Is also evident in. How about “informs,” a more definite verb? I don’t remember doing this.
• Dashes and semicolons. Think about how your eyes glaze over when you see a semicolon-laden sentence, however nicely parallel the clauses are.  What are you, a writer or a mouse?  If you need a new sentence, start one. I use a lot of dashes in personal writing (I’m a Russian-speaker, after all) but almost never in academic writing. I actually thought there was something wrong with me if I never used any semicolons so it’s nice to see somebody who is anti-semicolon.
• Way in which. Is anyone really going to care if you say “how” instead? Yes, I’m totally a “way in which” person. 
• Trendy words–er, important critical terms like “discourse.” Do you really need these words? I don’t think I do this all that often. Am I kidding myself, though? I use “discourse” and Co a lot in oral communications but only when I’m trying to be funny.
• Thus.  If the inference really does logically follow what you’ve said, do you need to signal it? “Thus” is important when you’re presenting a paper, but is it a signpost that the written paragraph really needs? My thesis director scared me away from “thus” many years ago.
• Just as . . . so too and Not only . . . but also.  Apparently First Draft Undine loves these parallelisms, but Subsequent Drafts Undine should learn that she is not the 21st-century Henry James of sentence stylings or Milton in writing epic similes. Every Single Draft Clarissa LOVES these, as well. I need to get rid of these tributes to Spanish writing style.
• This doesn’t even count the places where I add in a critic who maybe wrote something that referred in passing to a text in 1992 and who I see in my imagination glaring at me and crucifying me in reviews if I don’t cite him or her. I can’t tell you how often I do this. My reason for doing it is not the same as Undine’s, though. I mostly just feel like I need to demonstrate my erudition. It’s a bad idea every single time but I can’t control myself.

I’m going to do a lot of academic writing in the coming year, so I need to read as many posts like the linked one as possible.

I know everybody hates long quotes but this one is just too good:

It is true that last year’s poll suggested that nationally a disappointingly low majority of 59% of Canadians accept the notion of common descent. However, only 22% accept young earth creationism. In Ontario, the data are especially disheartening, with only 51% of respondents accepting evolution (but still only half as many choosing creationism). In Quebec, 71% accept evolution and only 9% align with creationist ideas. . .

The US poll referred to above (by CBS) indicates that 53% of respondents believe that life was created in its current form within the past 10,000 years by God, 23% accept a form of evolution guided by God, and 17% believe in a strictly natural evolutionary account.

If you have never visited Quebec, then I have no idea what you are waiting for.

I just encountered yet another stupid and nearly unreadable article from an academia-hater. I won’t analyze it in detail because it is as boring and poorly researched as a gazillion other anti-education pieces that appear in print and online every two minutes. I just want to offer the following quote as an example of the author’s stupidity:

Just about everyone in academia believes that they were the smartest kid in their class, the one with the good grades and the awesome test scores. They believe, by definition, that they are where they are because they deserve it. They’re the best.

If this freakazoid actually had an education, he’d know that yapping stupidly about what “everyone” does or does not believe is completely ridiculous and makes him sound like an idiot that he is. It would be phenomenal to work in an environment where everybody had this healthy self-esteem. Sadly, though, I have never encountered this crowd of folks with robust psychological health in academia. I’ve taught in different countries, different states in the US, different types of university, I have spoken at regional, national and international conferences, I have met people from a variety of colleges around the world. Most of these academics are tortured with endless self-doubt all day long. The rest are lucky enough only to experience it every other day.

What is really sad is that all of these endless and endlessly boring articles keep erasing universities like mine in a dogged fashion of true fanatics. My school charges the lowest tuition by far in the state, provides students with textbooks so that they don’t have to spend money on them, does not exploit adjuncts, does not pay excessive salaries to administrators. Yet the people who claim to be extremely preoccupied with the future of academia never mention us as a model that is worthy of emulation. If they really gave a damn about improving the existing model of higher ed, wouldn’t it make sense to mention places where things are done in a better way?

We never hear about anything positive happening in academia, though. The completely imaginary student who has a hundred thousand dollars worth of debt after getting a BA is discussed ad nauseam (including in the linked article, of course). And everybody is so eager to hear that higher ed sucks that they never question this obvious lie and never notice all of those students who are the first ones in their family to get a college degree thanks to schools like mine. Their journey of discovering the world is less valuable to the screechers than their fantasy of horrible, mean profs and miserable, stupid students.

P.S. I don’t know if you are following Ian Welsh but he and Thomas Frank are the most prominent peddlers of male hysteria these days. Have you noticed how fashionable it is becoming these days to be a male hysteric? I’m attributing this to misguided attempts to imitate sensitivity. Chest-thumping machismo is not in demand, so more and more men try to look sensitive. Sometimes their efforts look like an embarrassing show of unhinged shrieking we can see in the linked article.

I’m writing the “Acknowledgments” page of my book. It took me quite a while to realize that in describing the input of the scholar who directed my doctoral dissertation I said that “she worked tiresomely to help me improve my writing.”