Ukraine has banned the symbols of both of the totalitarian regimes that caused so much destruction to the country.

Maybe now Spain will finally manage to get rid of the symbols commemorating Franco ‘ s dictatorship.

Basia and I should totally teach a course together on how Spain and Ukraine are addressing the legacy of totalitarianism.

As you probably know, I’m obsessed with the Spanish Civil War. There are literally hundreds of novels on the war, and I haven’t read them all just yet. But I want to recommend some of them for those of you who are interested.

1. Andrés Trapiello’s Ayer no más (Just Yesterday) does not seem to have an English translation, which is a crying shame. Trapiello is a brilliant, encyclopedically educated intellectual who is defending the Fascist legacy of Spain and promoting the Francoist vision of the war in this novel. He does it in an extraordinarily talented and highly manipulative way that makes the novel fascinating for a critic and an intelligent reader. I’m writing an article on the novel right now. The novel is not so much about the war per se, as it is about today’s efforts to recover the war’s memory.

2. Mala gente que camina (Bad People Walking) by Benjamín Prado is another novel I will be analyzing in this article. Prado is a long-time antagonist of Trapiello and is trying to dispel the myths of Francoism in this novel. The book is based on the writer’s research of one of the most tragic and horrifying practices of the dictatorship, which consisted of taking the children of the Republicans away from their families in order to extirpate the taint of “Communism” from their minds.

3. Almudena Grandes, a very famous writer in Spain, is creating a series of novels on the war and the post-war period. Her Inés y la alegría (Ines and Joy) is a very curious attempt to inscribe the Spanish Republicans into a neo-Liberal fantasy of today. 

4. Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis is a megabestseller that does exist in an English translation. The novel is extraordinarily powerful and highly manipulative in its dedication to arouse sympathy towards Spanish fascism. An article of mine on the subject will come out soon. 

5. Antonio Muñoz Molina’s In the Night of Time also has an English translation. The novel goes on and on for hundreds of impossibly beautiful pages, hammering in the idea that the war was an instance of collective madness, in which both sides were equally guilty. As you probably know, this was the favorite idea of the Francoist 1960s propaganda. To rephrase a famous saying about Lenin, Franco might be dead but his mission is alive and thriving.

6. Rafael Chirbes’s La buena letra (Good Handwriting) is a short novel that does not exist in English. In the novel, the nostalgia for the Republican Spain masks a desire for the rebirth of the patriarchal world order. Chribes might be a Marxist (and my current most favorite writer ever), but he is also a huge sexist.

7. Dime quién soy (Tell Me Who I Am) by Julia Navarro is a 1104-page novel where every possible horror of the Spanish Civil War and WWII is exploited to shock, titillate, and sell copies. 

8. The Time In Between by María Dueñas has been translated into English. It is only 626 pages long (which is considered short for a Civil War novel) and exploits every convention of the damsel-in-distress genre. The vision of the Civil War it proposes is, yet again, the tired old “everybody is equally guilty.”

So as you can see, except for Prado, all of these authors are dedicated – to greater or lesser extent – to promoting the ideology of Franco’s regime, especially of its later stages in their novels.

I decided that it would be fun to combine the two series we’ve had on this blog: the link encyclopedia and oldies but goodies. Here are some links to my posts from the past:

Here is one of my moments of outrage against the vapid writing of Amanda Marcotte: “Got it? Women feel sexual desire in response to being paid more money and being given more help, encouragement, and compliments. From men, as far as I can gather. This is what passes for mainstream feminism this days, folks. Give her a huge cash gift, pay for a nanny and a housekeeper, praise her, and her desire for you – or for somebody – will shoot straight up.”

And here is a sad story of my friend who self-diagnozed impotence.

I also enjoy ridiculing the impotent mewling of the anti-Clarissa camp.

And, of course, making fun of textbooks that push weird stereotypes about Russians is always fun.

I actually tried teaching Russian once but it wasn’t a very successful attempt.

And since we are on the subject of Russians, here is a story from my Baltimore days and the perception of Russians in an anarchist cafe.

This is one of my most memorable experiences from a Russian restaurant in Madrid.

I’m giving a lecture on the war on drugs in a couple of hours, and here is my old post on the subject.

And since we are on the subject of teaching, here is a discussion of whether there is indoctrination in US colleges.

I love Canada but sometimes it gets too crazy.

And here are some thoughts on making fun of religious beliefs.

Since I’m on religion, here is a post on how I found religion.

And just one more post on religion.

And here I defended a colleague from Cornell and shared some of my experiences there.

Tell me if you like this new series!

It turns out that I have a lot more citations than I thought. And I didn’t know about them because esteemed scholars can’t copy my last name without mistakes.

I understand that it’s a weird name because it’s completely fake but one expects better from scholars. I wonder how many of them would remember to justify margins and save the file as requested.

I just opened the mailbox and found 3 envelopes. 

The first says “Yale University” and asks for a charitable donation.

The second says “[My current] University” and thanks me for a charitable donation.

The third says “Homeowners’ Association”, has a sticker of a cowboy on a horse and another sticker saying “God Bless America!” and asks me for homeowner dues.

Some very kind person helped me access Terry Eagleton’s article title “The Slow Death of the University.” Thank you, kind person!

As you must have gleaned from the title, the subject Eagleton is addressing in the piece is the tragic transformation of the function that universities have had since the very dawn of their existence (thank God for blogging where I can indulge my occasional urge to use cliches):

From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to São Paulo, an event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique.

I really believe that this process is a lot more momentous than the pointless and idiotic Cuban Revolution, but it’s great that Eagleton is choosing to discuss the issue.

Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism.

This is precisely what I have always valued so much about the work I do. For a few hours every week, my students and I get to remove ourselves from the cycle of selling, buying, and discarding as we gather to talk about literature. There are two pursuits that radically distance human beings from other species: the capacity to create art and the capacity to create knowledge. In my classroom, we engage in creating knowledge about art, which is the most exalted activity of the human mind that I can imagine.

Continue reading “Terry Eagleton’s “The Slow Death of the University”” →

People keep saying they don’t understand why Rolling Stone didn’t fire  the journalist who wrote the frat house gang rape story.

It’s like they live on a different planet.

This journalist is the best thing that ever happened to the magazine. People world over now know that it exists and is in the business of publishing gang rape porn. The magazine is experiencing its stellar moment. I’m reading articles about this article in several different languages published in several different countries.

And so what if the journalist in question is an unprofessional, stupid fool? Isn’t that the modern definition of a journalist?