The contractor says, “I also bought a house recently. I could only buy it because it stands on top of an old cemetery so it was cheaper. I keep finding headstones. Under my driveway, for instance, there are two people buried. And judging by the headstones, most of the people died while they were in their twenties. This is why I think they must be slaves. Also because the headstones are very simple, obviously very cheap. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything, but let me tell you, weird things keep happening in that house.”

On this blog, we recently discussed somebody’s opinion that nobody is publishing novels about the working classes any longer. This isn’t at all true, however. Such novels are there to be found and if people are not finding them, I’m guessing they aren’t looking very hard. For instance, there is a recent novel by Kelly Braffet called Save Yourself. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a good, solid novel that I greatly enjoyed reading.

The novel offers a very interesting contrast between the lives of its working class protagonists, with their crappy jobs and hopeless existences and the ridiculous overwrought dramas of their upper-middle class neighbors. In a brilliant move, Braffet doesn’t tell us how well-off the upper-middle class protagonists are. We only discover this when a working class protagonist observes them at a restaurant where she works and notices an enormous contrast between their reality and hers. This complete unawareness of the rich neurotics of how different their lives are from those of the working poor is the novel’s strongest point. What I really liked about the novel is that this contrast isn’t overworked. You see it if you want to see it, but the author doesn’t push it in your face. 

This is precisely what distinguishes literature from entertainment. A writer of an actual work of literature isn’t worried that readers wouldn’t get the point. She lets them approach the work of art on their own terms and take what they will from this.

The writing is surprisingly good, very simple and clear. The author seems to have an MFA but even this didn’t make her write in a pretentious, prettified way so many of the MFA graduates do. I definitely recommend the book, and I’m very glad I discovered this promising writer among the mountains of crappy novels American authors publish every year.

So I decided to find out what compels some Ukrainians to support Russia’s invasion of their own country and discussed this issue with some distant relatives on Facebook.

What I discovered is that these relatives are convinced that Russia is fighting a war against the United States. The relatives try to avoid the word “Ukraine” as much as possible and react very aggressively when I tell them that there are no NATO troops in Eastern Ukraine.

“But Russia has the right to defend itself against the NATO!” they keep repeating.

They also exhibit an intense and very racialized hatred of Obama who, in their opinion, has orchestrated the NATO’s invasion of Ukraine to improve the US’s economy. I didn’t manage to comprehend this particular argument in spite of people explaining it to me at length. It has something to do with Obama trying to stave off inflation in the US by means of his invasion of Ukraine.

People tell me I don’t watch mainstream newscasts often enough and have no idea what’s going on in them.

So I decided to watch. Turned on the CNN and discovered a debate on Israel and Palestine.

“Good!” I thought. “Maybe I am missing something important by ignoring these news channels.”

“The Palestinian side of the issue,” the newscaster said, “will be presented by journalist X who has a Jewish husband. The Israeli side will be defended by expert Y who has the following governmental appointments. . .”

Since the “journalist with a husband” didn’t raise any objections to being characterized this way while her opponent’s marital situation was not brought into the conversation, I realized that I wasn’t ready for mainstream media and switched the zombie box off.

The sanctions against Russia are having a negative impact on the lives of the people who belong to what one might call “Russia’s nascent middle class.” These are people who work for Western companies, have businesses, travel overseas, keep their money in the bank, have credit cards or maybe even investments, and consume at a steady pace.

The Western leaders project their feelings about the importance of the middle class onto Putin and conclude that the middle class’s suffering should be painful to Putin. In reality, however, the opposite is true.

Those Russians who have adapted to the capitalist system, who feel comfortable within it and who are hurt by the sanctions are Putin’s enemies. They are the ones who came out into the streets to protest the rigged elections of 2011-12. They constitute those 15% of population that doesn’t support Putin.

Putin will gain a lot from the dissident class becoming impoverished. In fact, the West is doing his work for him.

Such blunders will continue unless Western leaders overcome their dislike of academics and abandon their suspicious attitude towards the life of the intellect and begin consulting specialists with actual expertise in foreign cultures. 

OK, I just have to share this with the esteemed audience:

Now that I can drive, I can finally start going to our local farmers’ market on a regular basis. Before, I didn’t feel like forcing N to get up early to drive me there.

And here is what I noticed. Quite a few of the farmers accompany every purchase with printouts of stories that they wrote. The stories are usually akin to diary entries. In them, the farmers share a regular day in their lives. Nothing much happens, and that makes the stories fascinating.

I think it’s really cool because you get a glimpse into the lives of people who grow the food you buy. Farmers always look apologetic when they put the sheets with these stories into customers’ hands, and I always feel like telling them that I do the same thing but online.

Do your local farmers do that or is this a regional thing?

Now is not a good moment for narcissists. They are feeling especially aggrieved by how much attention is being directed to the events in Gaza and Ukraine. For a narcissist, nothing is more terrifying than the possibility that attention will move someplace else. Narcissist imagines him or herself as a perennial infant and assigns the rest of the world the role of the Mommy. If Mommy gets distracted, an infant’s life might be at risk. And for narcissists, not being the center of attention really feels like a questioning of their entire right to exist.

Here is a classic response of a narcissist to the annoying current events that tend to get in the way of the narcissist’s enjoyment of everybody’s undivided attention:

Yesterday, four little Palestinian boys from the same family playing on a Gaza beach were killed by an Israeli missile. Today, a plane full of people was shot down while flying over the Ukraine. There’s an ebola outbreak in Africa right now, not to mention an ongoing human rights crisis in Syria. Women in Egypt regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and no one seems to give a shit what happens to teenage girls stateside. Why would anyone reproduce into this mess?

When I was in my twenties, I was never sure about having children.

If you suggest to the author that her reproductive choices are not even remotely in the same order of magnitude that deaths in Gaza, Ukraine or Africa, the narcissistic rage that inspired the article will only intensify. It is useless to inform her that nobody cares whether she has children or not. She knows that nobody cares. And this is precisely what is killing her. The narcissist’s subconscious is screaming, “I’m a child whose Mommy has gone!” So the narcissist, very predictably, begins talking about children. The symbolic denial of smaller children’s right to exist is simply a way to insist on her own right to be the only child in the world.

The response this writer is fishing for is, “No, it’s not that bad, don’t give up having children because of Gaza, Africa and Ukraine!” This would be a very welcome response because it would give the narcissist exactly what she hoped for: a recognition that everybody else made a mistake by fixating on Gaza because things are not even really that bad there. The way a narcissist responds to welcome answers is to ramp up the intensity of fishing for attention. The moment you give her this response, she will clamp on to you forever, sucking attention, recognition, energy, and emotions out of you.

What is really sad, of course, is that the chances that this person will, indeed, choose not to reproduce are exceptionally slim. A child is the easiest, most defenseless audience for a narcissist. At the same time, nothing makes narcissists rage more than a child because they honestly feel like an infant is taking their place.

P.S. Thank you, reader Stringer Bell, for this curious link.

I just got a letter from the grief support group, advising me to “work out your grief in a more positive way.”

I could have done without that sage piece of advice, to be entirely honest.

The soldiers fighting on the side of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Lugansk People Republic” have published an open letter to their leadership. The letter proves that I was absolutely right from the very start. These people are not fighting against linguistic persecution (because there is none). Neither are they fighting against “fascism” or “Nazism.” Nor are they fighting against “Ukrainian nationalists.”

Do you know what they are fighting against?

Capitalism. 

As I said from the beginning, these are people who haven’t managed to adapt to capitalism and who believe they can resuscitate the Soviet system. Their entire open letter is dedicated to the economy. They have no interest in anything else.

And this is why Clarissa’s Blog is the best, most reliable source of information on the war in Ukraine.