Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina

Title: Como la sombra que se va

Year: 2014

My rating: 3,8 out of 6

This novel will most certainly get translated into English because Muñoz Molina is one of the greatest living writers in Spain. He has been awarded a bizillion prizes and sold millions of copies of his novels. His most recent one, however, is not a novel I would recommend to anybody. 

The writer’s penultimate book, Everything Solid, was an essay on the current economic crisis in Spain where Muñoz Molina condemned writers who write about history for their escapism. Given that he is famous precisely for writing beautifully about history, it was a little bizarre to see him bash and slash writers who are interested in history. It was even more bizarre to find out that right after publishing the essay, Muñoz Molina started a novel about. . . history.

His new novel is about the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve got to tell you, folks, I love this writer, I read everything he publishes, but I have no idea what the heck he was hoping to achieve in this novel. I’m trying to avoid reaching the conclusion that the novel was written to feed off the attention the anniversary of Selma is getting and ensure that the novel will get translated into English.

In the novel, Martin Luther King is a broken, confused, pathetic man who is hoping that somebody would put an end to the misery of an existence dedicated to saying things he doesn’t even believe in. King’s assassin kind of starts evoking compassion by the end of the very long novel. 

The writing is, as always, beautiful, but the novel is way too long and would easily stand to lose at least 150 pages.

There was an idiot hanging around the blog a while ago who kept insisting that tenured professors don’t get fired. Idiot, do come back and read the following:

Some departments were targeted for elimination because they included tenured faculty members who, through length of service, had reached the top of the salary scale. Faculty members also contended that tenured and nontenured members of the faculty were “cherry-picked” for elimination and that the administration did not offer credible programmatic reasons for the reductions.5 Members of the faculty in the affected programs further alleged that ill-conceived decisions to consolidate or eliminate programs resulted in a shortage of faculty members to teach required courses in spring 2015.

Got anything else to say, idiot? There are endless cases like that around the country.

For normal people, I need to issue a warning that the report is very disturbing even though nothing it contains is surprising to us. The president of my university uses the same verbiage as the president of USM, so obviously this is not making me hopeful for this university’s future.

Kerry is a total idiot for going to Russia. And so is Merkel. The interpreters who translate what they say to Putin edit the text to make it congruent with Russian propaganda.

For instance, the interpreter who was translating Merkel ‘ s speech edited the word “criminal” out of the statement “the annexation of the Crimea was a criminal enterprise on the part of Russia.”

The Kremlin then modifies the statements even further.

For instance, when John Kerry said, “Both sides need to observe the ceasefire in Donbass,” the statement is changed to say, “John Kerry berated Poroshenko for not observing a ceasefire in Donbass.”

One just doesn’t know of to laugh or cry at these news:

Sacramento sells water to a bottler, DS Services of America, at 99 cents for every 748 gallons — the same rate as other commercial and residential customers. That water is then bottled and sold at Walmart for 88 cents per gallon, meaning that $1 of water from Sacramento turns into $658.24 for Walmart and DS Services.

Keep all of this in mind when you next hear about California’s shortage of water. What’s a drought for you is a rainmaker for somebody else.

Reader NG asks a crucial question:

How is a consensual bias arrived at? I don’t have the answer but what are your thoughts? Did a whole lot of folks wake up one morning and decide that the Ukraine would now be referred to as a “former soviet vassal state”?

This is a great question. A great, great, REALLY GREAT question. What many people don’t realize is that the Kremlin employs an army of propaganda workers who – for years and years – go from one website to another and so on and so forth, repeating these same ideas, many many times, and then repeating them again. There are specific set phrases that they repeat, copy-paste, repeat some more. Gradually, after you encounter these set phrases several times in different contexts, you just automatically adopt them.

This all works on the level of basic language acquisition: first, the passive knowledge is created; then, it becomes active through repeated use.

One example is the expression “sphere of influence.” Putin is a great admirer of Stalin, and he came up with this philosophy that the two global superpowers (Russia and the US) should have their spheres of influence, just like Stalin agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt during WWII. Ten, fifteen years ago the whole thing sounded completely bizarre. Russia was needing American handouts to survive, it was barely managing to handle day-to-day operations, what sphere of influence could it hope to have?

But the Kremlinbots kept working, copy-pasting their “sphere of influence” argument time and again, and what do you think? Russia is doing worse than ever by every measure, yet the belief that “Russia deserves to have its own sphere of influence” has colonized the minds of an enormous number of American reporters and even professors of Slavic Studies. And then you see these fools passionately defend the idea of “the spheres” because they heard it several times and, for them, this is a prompt to accept it as their own.

Never underestimate people’s willingness to be manipulated. There is so much that new technologies are permitting us to do in terms of propaganda, and so very few folks are actually making use of these opportunities.

It’s gotten to the point where the President of Ukraine is personally asking stupid Zuckerberg to open a Facebook office in Ukraine because Kremlinbots rule Facebook like it’s their loyal vassal. For instance, they’ve managed to ban as pornographic this photo of a little girl wearing her dead father’s medal:

Of course, what upset the Kremlinbots were the colors of the Ukrainian flag in the photo. There are so many trolls who do this sort of thing professionally that it’s next to impossible to keep any pro-Ukrainian Facebook page alive. And Zuckerberg, while opening completely useless offices in places like Montréal, still can’t open one in Ukraine.

The hidden curriculum is created by the environment in which you are located and instills you with the norms and values of your academic culture. Think about it: admitting incompetence is a loss of face and undermines your academic authority with your peers. Hence the fear of admitting you might not really know how to search the literature thoroughly or efficiently [emphasis is not mine].

People who think this way will never amount to anything because their field of vision will forever be limited by the psychological problems they keep mistaking for objective reality. I’m telling everybody in sight how I made an ass of myself recently because I had no idea how to write abstracts. And it doesn’t occur to me to fret about loss of face and undermining of authority.

And then these loss-of-face people come into the classroom and start projecting their battle for respect with the inner censor onto the students. 

OK, folks, are there any French-speakers around? How do I say “This is really great news! Thank you for letting me now. Here is my address”?

I’m getting published in French but – and I’m very very ashamed to say this – I just can’t find any remnants of French in me right now to respond to the editors.

No matter how much money Yale gets in donations, it will renovate everything but the horrible little building where the Department of Spanish and Portuguese is located.

The building is dank, gloomy, and stinky. The reason for the stench is the fast food joint on the first floor. Orders yelled out in the kitchen are so loud that some offices are nearly impossible to work in.

This is a little hint to those who are wondering why no graduate students decided to join this marginalized and disrespected department.

An IKEA is opening in St Louis.

This must mean we actually exist.