Well, of course somebody was bound to develop a sexual fetish for MLA interviews. A fetishistic attachment is a frequent response to a traumatic experience. The need to replay the painful episode is similar to the compulsion to pick on a scab. Finally, it ends up causing a masochistic sort of pleasure.

The only thing that is surprising here is why more people don’t fetishize the MLA sexually.

In yesterday’s sermon that accompanied my driving lesson, I heard a new word: “subconscience.” Contrary to what you might think, “subconscience” doesn’t refer to a substandard conscience. No, it means the God-given feeling of what is right that sits deep inside your subconscious.

I know my analyst will dig it.

Imagine that you are a graduate student in the US in a moribund field, in particular, Germanic Studies. Tenure lines in German are being closed down, departments of Germanic Studies disappear. This is quite paradoxical since Germany has become the most powerful and rich country in Europe. At the very moment when Germany is gaining – without invading anybody or shooting a single person, which for Germany is a big step forward – the prominence on the world arena that it has been seeking desperately enough to start two world wars, the US decides that Germany has lost all relevance and chooses to stop studying and teaching the German language and culture.

Surely, this is something that as a Germanist you might find interesting. You might even want to start (or join) a discussion about the reasons behind this strange and disturbing phenomenon.

Now imagine that you, a concerned, intelligent specialist in Germanic Studies, are given an opportunity to write for Die Welt, an important German newspaper with national readership. Here is a chance to do something for the field to which you have dedicated your life. Here is a golden opportunity to tell the German people what is going on, maybe play on their nationalist sentiment a little bit (“Americans think we are done for, what’s up with that?”, “The culture of Goethe is being disrespected in the US!”). Star a discussion, get things moving, questions brewing, discontent stewing. Even if you are guaranteed the best job in Germanic Studies in the US, it still matters to you that the field doesn’t disappear. Being the only Germanist on the continent is a sad and lonely affair. You need conferences in your discipline to be attended by people, journals be published by, once again, people, a scholarly exchange be conducted by this inescapable evil, other people.

But this is what you, an intelligent person, would do in this situation. A real graduate student in Germanic Studies used his opportunity to write for Die Welt to inform the German readers that academic blogger Rebecca Schuman is a sore loser and her writing is sometimes vulgar. In the eyes of this brave and engaged Germanist, Schuman is the biggest problem faced by the field of Germanic Studies today.

I have to say, folks, I love Germanic Studies, and if my field didn’t exist, German would be my second choice. But when I read about this kind of irredeemable stupidity, I can’t help thinking that the field whose Ivy League departments produce people of this intellectual caliber deserves to die. While their entire academic world is crumbling down around them, they vent their pathetic little grievances against bloggers who wrote some post they disliked.

I now have no hope whatsoever for this field.

As if the price the country paid for its ridiculous colonial efforts on North Africa weren’t high enough, Spain stubbornly holds on to Ceuta and Melilla, its last two enclaves in North Africa.

Something very disturbing took place in the poorest neighborhoods of Melilla the other day. The unemployment rate in these barrios stands somewhere between 47%-50%. Every year, the authorities publish a list of people who are given 6-month-long jobs by the government. These jobs pay €1,000 and require no qualifications. The lucky few whose names get on to the list get to clean public areas, tend the gardens belonging to the municipality, and so on.

After it was announced that new regulations had been passed and now only those who had resided in the city for at least 2 years would get a chance to appear on the list, the neighborhoods inhabited by many recent and illegal immigrants erupted in violence. A group of about 60 unemployed barricaded one of the streets and violently resisted attempts by the police to remove the barricade.

The official name of the barrio where the disturbances took place is La Cañada de Hidum. It has long been known, however, as La Cañada de la Muerte (the Valley of Death.) The people populating the neighborhood are illiterate and lack any kind of job skills. This makes their employment opportunities limited to the menial, low-paid, scarce jobs that only allow to keep surviving in the barrio without  any hopes of leaving it. Aside from the 6-month jobs offered by the municipal authorities once a year, people in the Valley of Death manage to scrape by selling drugs, exploiting the even more marginalized and dispossessed immigrants from the Sahara, and engaging in petty crime.

It is easy to overlook what is happening in faraway Melilla, a place that is marginal both to Spain and North Africa. I believe, however, that we need to be paying attention to the events in Melilla. The chasm between the educated who have the whole world open to them and the illiterate who are forever stuck in the barrio is growing. The reality where one could carve out a decent living with a low-skill blue-collar job does not exist any longer.

We live in the world where there is a soaring number of people whose skills and time are so precious that they hire career management services, employ life coaches, attend networking events, participate in mentorship programs, download endless productivity apps, and schedule their lives in 10-minute increments. At the same time, the gulf between such people and the functionally illiterate / unskilled is widening. There used to be a middle-ground between these two classes but it is disappearing.

This is a major societal transformation that we are witnessing. La Cañada de Hidum, a miserable, hopeless slum, filled with confused, angry people, is coming to your town soon, too. Something really major needs to be done to make sure that the majority of the population doesn’t end up in this dead-end barrio. In order to do that, we need to stop looking backwards and sighing for how things used to be 20, 30, 50 years ago. That time is gone, and there is no going back. The technological revolution(s) of the second half of the XXth century are leaving many people behind. Remember what happened during the Industrial Revolution of the XIXth century when the agricultural societies were destroyed? What is happening today is very similar.

Nobody made any efforts to soften the blow of the inevitable (and ultimately wonderful and absolutely necessary) Industrial Revolution for those whom it was hurting the most. As a result, we all ended up with two world wars and several bloody totalitarian regimes on our hands.

Isn’t it time to learn from the past and ensure that the Technological Revolution costs the humanity less than the Industrial Revolution did?

When N gives me driving lessons, he makes me listen to an Evangelical radio station because I need to learn to keep my cool in stressful situations. And what is more stressful than the endless chirping of anti-gay crusaders? The preachers on this station are obsessed with the advances of gay rights and talk about them endlessly.

A good priest I know always tell the parishioners who come to him with similar complaints, “My dear child, try to concentrate on your own soul and on your own spiritual well-being. Don’t tell me about what others are doing. Tell me about your own anger, envy, sloth, greed, etc. The best you can do is try to make yourself a little better. God’s plan for you does not include judging others.”

I’m reading a new book by the amazing, amazing, amazing Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. In this novel, I discovered a new word: TUPERVARES.

Can you guess what it means?

This word is from the same group as GÜISQUI, PANCAQUES and YONQUI.

Obviously, you don’t have to be a Spanish-speaker to guess what the words mean.

Also, if you know more words like these, do share.

Canada’s York University thought it was a good idea to let a religious fanatic trample on human rights:

The student, whose name has not been released, cited religious grounds for his request to be excused from a group project in his sociology class. His religion is unclear.

Prof. Paul Grayson originally rejected the man’s request that he be allowed to skip the group project and the student went on to meet with his female classmates as scheduled.

But Grayson said he was later told by the dean of the faculty of liberal arts and professional studies that the student should have been accommodated, since the request did not have a “substantial impact” on the rights of other students.

The Dean of Illiberal Artlessness and Unprofessional Hatred of Studies soon discovered that not everybody in Canada is ready to let religious fanatics destroy the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

Federal MPs of all political stripes took a Toronto university to task Tuesday for siding with a male student who requested that he be excused from participating in a group project with women.

The York University student, whose name has not been released, cited religious grounds for the request. His religion is unclear.

At least, Canada can boast normal politicians.

But the best part of the story is this:

A statement from the university said it based its decision on a number of factors, including consideration of the Ontario Human Rights Code, the individual circumstances, the requirements of the law and the academic requirements of the course.

Apparently, York University has discovered a new human right: treating women as subhuman. Good job, York University!

Thank you, ladyleahjane, for this informative link!

A student wrote on the evaluations that it was hard to understand what I was saying in class because I have a very strong accent.

This hard-core intellectual didn’t manage to figure out that, in a course called ‘Spanish’, I was not speaking English with an accent. I was speaking Spanish.

Right after I wrote the previous post, I received my student evaluations for last semester. And they just killed me. One of the questions we ask is “How could this course be improved?”

And one after another, students answered that it was disruptive and inconvenient to have the instructor change twice within the course. Nothing insults me more than complaints about how much what happened to me inconvenienced somebody. I’m shocked by this need people have to see themselves as victims of somebody else’s tragedy. This complete self-immersion borders on the schizophrenic.

I hate it when people constantly feel aggrieved by absolutely everything in the world. These students had no real complaint to make. Not a single one of them mentioned any real instance of how the change of instructor was disruptive to them. But still they felt victimized.

I despise these fake victims because I’m not one of them.

I’m a warrior.

From a messianic history laden with promises of a better future, we have moved to a view of history as grievance; concurrently, the focus is on the victims of history, and no longer on the heroic figure of the warrior.

Ángel Loureiro, “Pathetic Grievances.”

Loureiro is a famous Hispanist but please don’t think I was alluding to him in the previous post. I just wanted to share this great quote and ask what you think about it. Loureiro is a great guy and, in my experience, very respectful towards non-Hispanic Hispanists.