Author: David Becerra Mayor
Title: La guerra civil como moda literaria
Year of publication: 2015
My rating: 10 out of 10

People keep saying that nobody reads books by scholars of literature but that’s not true. I read them both for work and for fun, and Becerra Mayor’s study of the Civil War novel was most definitely both.

Everybody who works in the field thinks it would be super cool to have somebody find all these novels, count them, list all of their editions, create graphs showing when the genre spiked in popularity and offer an analysis of the graphs. Obviously, everybody is hoping that somebody else would do it because the work is massive.

Becerra Mayor is my hero right now because he did the work. This book of his will be extremely useful to those who want to have a comprehensive review of the field.

This, however, is just a tiny part of what the book does. Graphs and lists appear at the very end of the 456-page volume. The bulk of the study offers a heavily Marxist analysis of the reasons why the genre is so fashionable. The author does tend towards the repetitiveness and heavy-handedness at times but it’s still an extremely useful study.

P.S. My enjoyment and ratings of books have zero connection to whether I agree with their authors. It will be a sad moment when I start to read just to hear my own thoughts mirrored back at me.

So what do you think about the Mario Valencia case out in Arizona?

The guy stole a rifle and walked in the street brandishing it and then shot it in the air. So a police vehicle accelerated and hit him from behind, disarming him but not harming him much.

I think that here the cop was totally justified and acted in a commendable way.

Stores that have rifles lying about in a way that makes it easy to steal them, though, weird me out.

“So what will your talk at Oxford be about?” I was asked and realized that, throughout the drama of getting funding, I actually forgot what my topic was.

After searching on every computer and hard drive in existence for the abstract and straining my brain to the utmost trying to remember at least the general area of the proposed talk, I decided that the only thing to do was to ask the conference organizers.

This prospect was so humiliating that the overpowering sense of embarrassment and guilt made me remember where a copy of the abstract was hiding.

Why is “Journalist of the Century” post that got very little attention when it was published suddenly booming today? I’m not seeing any linkage to it that could explain it.

The stylist says she needs to mix as much color for my hair as she normally does for SIX people.

I’m going for a dramatic change in color for my birthday this week.

A colleague who is a part-time instructor of French tells me that he us not being given any courses to teach next academic year. We have raised our enrollment caps, stuffing language classes so full of students that the quality of instruction will plummet. And the colleague  (who is adored by the students) is out of a job.

But we have saved a whopping $500 a month that the instructor was getting paid. Yippee.

It feels like “Basia and Me” is turning into a regular series on the blog.

Today we met the students who are studying to be journalists to discuss Ukraine. Basia prepared a PowerPoint presentation of great sophistication and intellectual insight. I prepared some funny stories about idiot journalists.

I started my talk by giving some examples of low-quality coverage of Ukraine but the contact with the audience that I usually enjoy simply wasn’t there.

“So what is it that you know about what is happening in Ukraine?” it finally occurred to me to ask.

“Nothing!” the students responded cheerfully.

“Do you know that something is happening?” I persisted.

“No!” the students responded with an even greater cheer.

Obviously, a person who glanced at a news website, held a newspaper or walked by a TV screen in the past year wouldn’t have missed the word “Ukraine” in the headlines. Journalism is a harsh, low-paying, extremely competitive career. It is an absolute mystery to me why people who have zero interest in journalism would want to study to become journalists.

Of course, after all this, Basia had to can her prepared talk and start all over again with the usual “Ukraine is a country. It’s a big country. Russia is also a country.”

 In 2006, Putin abolished forest fire protection services and put all of the forest rangers in the street. I hope that we are all educated people here and can figure out how much of Russia’s enormous territory is covered by forests, right?

So, obviously, the absence of forest fire protection services was a disaster waiting to happen. Today, fires are ravaging the forests to the East of the Urals, destroying villages, killing people, and moving towards the border with China. 

In the photo, you can see one of such villages that burned to the ground yesterday. The enormously rich Russia, however, has no money to help the victims or stop the fires. All of the resources are going into fighting the war in Ukraine. 

 

They are also unoriginal as hell. You know how the Mexican government keeps announcing it has won the war on drugs every fifteen seconds? In a similar way, Putin’s media keep announcing that Ukrainian troops have been defeated and completely destroyed.

The Azov Battalion has already been “defeated and completely destroyed” 7 times. The Donbass Battalion is a bit less successful, having been “defeated and completely destroyed” only 5 times. These battalions manage to be “defeated and completely destroyed” on the front lines even when they find themselves undergoing training back at the base. Obviously, the soldiers of these battalions only find out about their complete destruction from the Russian media.

Kremlinbots seem to have a very boring fantasy life that is based on endless repetitions.