Trust me to be a total weirdo in everything. I just perused this article on sleeping positions and discovered that mine is the rarest of all. It’s called “Starfish” and it’s supposed to mean that I’m a very loyal friend. Which is true. If I appoint somebody my friend, I become loyal as a dog to that person.

This sleep position also means that I love hearing the problems of others, and not to gloat but to help. This is also true, I’m a total Savior (I’m talking personality types, not religion.)

The really sad news is that people don’t, won’t or can’t read. I’m looking at the reviews of Crematorio, an award-winning, critically acclaimed novel by the ultra-talented Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. And as you can imagine, I’m not going to Amazon or GoodReads to find these reviews. I’m talking specifically about reviews by professional scholars of literature that have appeared in scholarly journals.

Chirbes is not a very easy writer to read but he’s not all that hard either. He has this very distinctive narrative format where a novel is subdivided into sections, and every section is told from the perspective of a different character. With this kind of writing, a reader has to pay attention and analyze, obviously. But one would think that literary critics know how to do that.

What I’m discovering, however, is very disturbing. One reviewer states that Mónica is the mother of Silvia. This critic is undaunted by Mónica being at least 20 years Silvia’s junior. And mind you, these are not some minor characters. It is crucially important that Silvia’s 73-year-old father married a 20-year-old Mónica, making Silvia very resentful. There is a very long section where Silvia discusses the death of her mother and the feelings of betrayal when her supposedly grieving father picked up the cheap and vulgar Mónica.

Another critic keeps listing the characters whose perspective we see in each section but stubbornly misses one of them. That wouldn’t be so shocking (I mean, there’s half a dozen characters, who can be expected to keep track of all of them? Surely not a scholar of literature who has more important things to do) if the character this critic studiously avoids mentioning were not. . . a literary critic. You’d think that this would make the character memorable to literary critics, but there’s no such luck.

The character who is the worst off is Yuri, a Russian bandit. Not a single scholar whose review I have read so far has been able to retain his name. Even though that name is repeated on every page, it just doesn’t stick with the readers who keep confusing Yuri with other characters.

I understand that reviews don’t “count” as products of research and have no influence on tenure or promotion. But if one is signing one’s name to a piece, even a short inconsequential piece, doesn’t it sound like a good idea to avoid sounding like an idiot?

I’m translating a PowerPoint from English into Russian, and I get a feeling that I’m not doing it the right way.

For instance, the presenter says, “This is our best product, kind of, I mean, you know.” And I’m translating this as, “This is our best product.” Which is not what the presenter really said, is it? I mean, you know. I don’t even know how to translate “kind of, I mean, you know” into Russian.

The first rule of a good (non-literary) translator is always to translate exactly the text you are given, without trying to prettify or edit it in any way.

The first rule of a great translator is to be like this notorious Russian translator who was accompanying a Russian general on an official visit to France. After the excursion to the Louvre, the general was asked what he liked the most.

“Naked broads and dogs!” the general blurted out.

“Flemish school of painting,” the talented translator translated.

So now I’m wondering if a PowerPoint on oil refineries deserves my talents as a great translator.

Every gormless idiot under the Sun is writing that the tragedy of Flight MH17 will be “a gamechanger” for Putin. This is completely stupid, of course. The terrorists who shot down the plane are not letting the investigative commission approach the crash site. They are drunk, they are laughing, they are marauding among the remains. They are having fun with this. Everybody in Russia agrees with Putin’s statement that Ukraine is to blame because Ukrainians created the situation where some brave folks felt the need to defend themselves and fired the missile that hit the plane.

What gamechanger? Westerners need to stop assuming that Putin or his troops give a rat’s ass about the Europeans’ or Anericans’ opinion of them. Enough with the ridiculous , “We are going to show Putin that we are upset and he will jump to attention.” He won’t. He doesn’t care.

This should have been a gamechanger for the West with its silly “extreme concern” and idiotic “this is not a Cold War because we don’t want it to be.” An airplane of civilians falls from the sky, and all these clowns can do is call Putin and beg him to “cooperate” because if he doesn’t, the most horrible punishment will be imposed on him. That is, a few of his buddies will not be allowed to travel to Europe. Because nothing more horrible can occur to a person than being denied the right to travel to Europe.

Some facile fool wrote yesterday that most of the world dislikes Putin, which is supposed to be crucially important to the guy because, as we all know, everybody’s goal in life is to be liked. Of course, Putin is massively liked in China, Latin America, and among the especially stupid in the West, but none of this stops the idiots who think, “I don’t like Putin. Poor guy, I don’t know how he deals with being disliked by me. That must be an intolerable misfortune. Maybe I should pity him after all.”

But here is a question to the proponents of “this is a gamechanger” theory. It isn’t a gamechanger for you. You haven’t changed anything in your way of treating Putin. And if it isn’t a gamechanger for you who suffered civilian losses, why should it be for Putin who hasn’t?

Then the guide announced: “They do a great job preparing you for grad school here. So when you go, you’ll be ready.”

“When you go?” We heard this at several schools. When did grad school become an expectation? For which careers? All of them?

In the twenty-first century. Yes, for all that can actually be called “careers.” Wake up already. It makes as much sense to bemoan this new reality as it is to fret over the invention of a light-bulb. Yes, candlelight was way cooler but let’s get over it once and for all.

I linked to the post but I don’t recommend it because it can’t be of interest to anybody but the author’s psychiatrist. Or people who are fascinating by parental negative programming and ways in which parents create intolerable anxiety and intense feelings of guilt in their children.

Dear British readers, please satisfy my curiosity. When you meet new people, do you say, “I’m British” or “I’m from the UK?” Do you use “UK” or “Great Britain”? Or are they interchangeable? Do you use “England” and “English”?

And also, do you use the word “gormless”? I keep seeing it in British novels but have never heard anybody use it in real life.

I love your country, you all rock.

I could have never imagined that there would be people willing to defend Zizek’s plagiarism. But here is somebody on Inside Higher Ed who thinks it’s OK to plagiarize because scholars are too busy to do actual scholarship and everybody plagiarizes anyway:

Yet this balance often conceals the fact that we rely on “secondary sources” all the time without necessarily citing them (who hasn’t looked up something on Wikipedia — without citing it — to get some bearings?).

I really love it when people use the “royal we” to project their weirdness onto others.

Conversely, we often pad our arguments with citations to things we haven’t read well or at all. Not only because that’s what’s expected but also because doing so allows us to cover our arguments with a supposed mastery of a literature that is virtually impossible for any one person to master. Whoever says that he or she hasn’t done as much either is lying or hasn’t published.

As I just said on Jonathan Mayhew’s blog:

I used to do this. And while I was doing it I kept getting article rejections. Then I realized that this was an idiotic way to work and started gaining the “impossible” mastery of my field. And then managed to get published.

The process of mastering the field and learning to find one’s way around what was said and when and by whom and in response to what is incredible fun. And people who miss out on that fun because it’s too hard or time-consuming are not really scholars.

You are supposed to live for this shit, snatching any moment you can to read that new article on the Spanish Civil War, or whatever your area of research is supposed to be. And if you see it as an impossible proposition and a drag, then you are in the wrong profession. I almost fell off the Stairmaster yesterday, for instance, because I was trying to underline something in an article I had received through Interlibrary Loan an hour earlier (not a good idea at all. Please do not replicate this experiment.)

The best part in the defense of plagiarism comes at the end, of course:

We’re all mere mortals, so perhaps it would be best to lower our expectations with regard to what we do, really acknowledge our debt to others, and allow practice to catch up with theory.

Of all the inventive excuses I have received from students who have plagiarized, “I’m a mere mortal, Professor, so please lower your expectations” is not one I have ever heard before.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

My book is out and I will get my author’s copies next week! In time for me to include the book in my tenure review! Yes, yes, yes!

I wish it were a kind of a book where I could create a blog contest and award a free copy to the winners but it is, rather, the kind of a book where people will see having to read it as punishment.

I’m kidding, the book is very good. But it’s scholarly, and the quotes are in Spanish. I will never force anybody to read it. Even the people who appear in the Acknowledgments. I’m looking straight at you, people who appear in the Acknowledgments.

The editor says it came out very pretty. And did I mention that the editor is a superstar in my field and a scholar I want to be when I grow up?

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

All I now need to make my academic happiness complete is to scare up a review of the book in a scholarly journal. Ol., I’m looking straight at you. If I teach Klubnikis to say, “Vive le Québec libre!”, will you do it? Her mother will slaughter me, but at least I will die as a published and reviewed author.

Shit, I wish I were more sociable and had more friends who could write reviews for me.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

I get a text message from N, saying: “Kisses! Embraces! More kisses!”

My response: “Are you making a promise or informing me of your current activities during your lunch break?”

Reader Valter07 asked the following question about the current Ukraine-Russia conflict:

“And why have you chosen the pro-Ukrainian side of the conflict?”

If the roles were reversed, for instance: Russians rise against Putin, remove him from office, then Ukrainians under Yanukovich invade Russia and annex Belgorod, and there is an 86% of support for these activities in Ukraine – is there any doubt in anybody’s mind that I would refer to Ukrainians as anything but terrorists, animals, and a disgrace on humankind? If there is such a doubt, then I have to say, people, you are too weird.

If this scenario took place, I’d immediately choose a Russian flag as my Facebook avatar and start ranting against Ukrainians on the blog. And if that is not obvious, then I’m just weirded out completely. I don’t understand how a normal person with a functioning brain can not be appalled by these actions, irrespective of which side of which invented border they happened to be born.