Can anybody explain to me the logic of substituting a crowd of full-time employees with two crowds of part-timers?

Yes, you can save on having to pay them benefits but the quality of service and / or product you put out will plummet and the company will lose all respectability. If customers have any sort of choice whatsoever, they will move away. The reputation will be destroyed.  How many companies / schools do you know that set on this path and have annihilated themselves? I know only too many.

Are people who making these decisions really that stupid and out of touch?

Further proof that Treglown is an idiot (sorry, dear non-Hispanists readers, I need to get this out of my system) is that when naming “the most stylistically interesting” Spanish writers of the 1960-1980, he mentions Juan Benet and Miguel Delibes. Juan Goytisolo is mentioned ONCE in the entire book and only as somebody who praised Aub.

Of course, literary tastes are highly subjective but if you are talking of stylistically interesting writers and pretend that Goytisolo doesn’t exist, you shouldn’t be talking about literature.

Well, Treglown sees no difference between T S Eliot and Peman, a fascist Franco-lover and ass-kisser, so what can we expect?

By the way, who are these fans of Treglown who are down voting my posts about him?

The argument Treglown makes in his new book Franco’s Crypt is quite bizarre. If you agree that beautiful works of art were created during Franco’s dictatorship, he says, then you have to agree that the dictatorship wasn’t all that bad. And if you insist that the crimes of fascists should be investigated and discussed, you must surely hate Laforet, Berlanga, Saura, Cela, Marse, etc.

It logically follows from this that if you believe that the Diary of Anne Frank is an important and poignant book, you can’t afford to be critical of Hitler.

The professor who has had his tenure at our university the longest has a species of lizard named in his honor. (Because he studies them and not for any unpleasant reason.)

I just thought this was cute.

 

I’ve got to start cataloguing all of the inventive ways people are using the word “privilege” these days. Here is one. Author Jeremy Treglown is talking in his book Franco’s Crypt about a documentary by Patino and mentions that, in the movie, the rich and powerful

are always seen in privilegedly small numbers.

I’m guessing that Treglown is not very much into people.

If you are a fellow Hispanist and were considering reading Franco’s Crypt, I don’t recommend it. The author is an embodiment of every bad stereotype about the British people. For him, a Spanish artist, no matter how renowned and talented, needs to have been noticed by some obscure Brit to merit any attention.  He is pompous, self-aggrandizing, obnoxious, and very much enamored of Franco’s dictatorship.

I will be bashing him in my next article because just thinking of this fellow makes my blood pressure go up.

This article wasn’t written by me. But it could have been.

If a crisis occurs in my department, I know the email will fly starting at 5 am, and there will be meetings and ridiculously overwrought machinations by everyone. I skim the email, take the long way around the building to my office, sip coffee, and wait until the “decision” comes through. They’ve all wasted a day in hand wringing and I’ve appropriately just had my say when the final news came down. Some of them I can imagine scrambling to their computers to write the latest post for College Misery about the trauma!

What I’m saying is that this is an important profession and we do important work, but it’s just a job, people. I think that a lot of you would be a lot happier if you’d just relax a bit. If your student doesn’t staple his paper? Staple it. What’s the big deal. They take a phone call in class? You mean you’re that insecure that you can’t just shut them down and keep going. And seriously, what’s the deal with being upset when a student asks for next semester’s books. You don’t have a link to the bookstore you can send them?

This academic is completely right. People are too overwrought and drama-queenish. I’ve been following the College Misery website for years for the same reason many people enjoy fantasy and science fiction: it is entertaining to observe a reality that is completely different from yours while being at a safe distance from it. And finally there is a post I can relate to.

Do read the whole thing.

OK, folks, it’s that time of year again when I get restless about the blog theme and feel the need to change it. Please look at the following possibilities and vote for the one you prefer:

Theme 1 (Inspiration Laboratory):

Theme 2 (Adelle):

Theme 3 (Retro-fitted):

Or we could go back to our penultimate theme which is appropriately titled “Retro-fitted”:

Theme 4 (Grisaille):

Theme 5 (Under the Influence):

Theme 6 (Bon Vivant):

Theme 7 (SemPress):

So let’s vote! It’s time to be adventurous and change things around. You can choose up to 3 answers.

Dear UK, have you gone off your nut completely? Is this shit even for real?

Female students banned from speaking at Islam seminar and forced to walk through separate ‘sisters only’ entrance at leading London university.

You’ll say this is Daily Mail, so it’s got to be a load of baloney. But here is Reuters saying that the situation is even worse than what Daily Mail tells us:

Research by Student Rights, a group which aims to prevent extremism at universities, said that over the year to March 2013, 46 events at 21 separate institutions were found to have either explicitly promoted segregation by gender or implied that this would be the case. Six of these were cancelled before they took place, however, the group said.

And here is Cameron’s pathetically limp-wristed and bleating response:

Mr Cameron said: ‘I’m absolutely clear that there should not be segregated audiences for visiting speakers to universities in Britain.

‘That is not the right approach, the guidance should say that universities should not allow this.’

Can one be any more pathetic? “This is not a very good  thing to do, kiddies. The guidlines should not allow universities to allow not to allow for this to be allowed. . .”

How about, “This is a disgusting, vicious barbarity that no civilized society will ever allow”?

Or, how about, “Our insane immigration policies have saddled our society with a crowd of religious fanatics who hate the most beautiful advances of civilization and want to destroy them.”

Or, better yet, “Anybody who attempts to engage in such a practice, expresses an endorsement for it, or sighs with longing about it will be deported within 3 hours and never let back in under any pretense.

It is still not too late to do this. But soon it will be.

Because in 40 years anybody who dares whisper in a small, scared voice that maybe women should also have some rights since they are kind of human will be deported within 3 hours and never let back in under any pretense.

My blog is popular among professors of English (because they are very smart) and enthusiasts of the language. So I’m asking them to help out a non-native speaker.

Here is my question: does the word “vociferous” have negative connotations for you? For example, in the sentence “Barcelona was vociferous in demanding the return of these papers”, is the speaker trying to express a veiled dislike of Barcelona’s demands or am I imagining a whiff of negativity here?

And sometimes I just thank the universe for my blogroll.

Today, I’ve been to the swimming pool, missed the bus and had to trudge through the snow for 25 minutes, had my 2-hour driving lesson, went to the bookstore, worked on my article, made dinner and was ready to drop dead because I had no more energy left whatsoever. And then I saw this genius post title in my blogroll and it jolted me awake and ready for additional scholarly pursuits:

I’m Dreaming Of A White Santa

This is really brilliant.