Opinions, art, debate
This is the answer to my question of who won the Republican debate:
I get everything here except the Ted Cruz part. Does anybody even remember his performance at the debate? I thought he was as insipid as Rubio. What is it that viewers could have liked about him? Not that I care since he has zero chances of being elected but I’m curious.
For research purposes, I’m reading the gushing prophecies of the academics from the 1990s about how amazing the world without full-time permanent employment will be. As long as people’s basic necessities are covered (as they invariably are in developed countries), not having to work more than a couple of hours a week will give everybody great leisure to develop personally and engage in civic activism, they said. The world will become a beautiful place as long as we get rid of work, those intellectuals prophesied.
Stupid tools. I hope one of the millions of young people in Spain or Italy or France who have no hope in hell of ever finding anything but crappy part-time temp jobs will locate these gushy idiots and spit in their stupid, happy faces.
I couldn’t agree more. I wish I’d realized sooner that I don’t need to feel guilty for the strangeness of my writing process. When I write, I need to interrupt myself every 10 minutes to look something up online, saunter around the room aimlessly, check the blog, stare at the squirrels’ antics, take out my collection of fresh notebooks and admire them, etc. It’s as much part of writing for me as typing the words and consulting the sources.
And hey, this is the correct writing process. For me.
Moral of the story: let’s all find one thing we can stop feeling guilty about right now and just do it. It will do us a mountain of good.
Author: Pedro J. de la Peña
Title: We Need a New Generation of ’98
Year: 2012
Country: Spain
Pedro J. de la Peña is one of those vestiges of the past (that’s my polite way of saying “weird old farts”) who believe the tired old canard of how Spain entered into a tragic period of decline at the end of the glorious XVIIth century and has been declining since then. He’s also into the whole song and dance about the “red hordes” that burned churches and provoked the long-suffering Franco into taking in hand the horrible Second Republic.
Peña is a professor of literature in Spain, by the way. In case you were wondering why I always say that it’s useless to try to go study literature in Spain.
Mind you, even somebody who’s your ideological opposite can offer useful insights. For instance, Peña points out that ties and business suits still serve as markers of social class but in the opposite way to how they were used in the past. Today, people who go to work dressed any way they like are the privileged ones. And ties are reserved for low-paid bank tellers. This is very true. N.’s first crappy internships required a suit and a tie. And his current well-paid full-time job gives him the right to wear whatever he likes. This is a result of our efforts to fake that we live in classless societies.
Yes, it’s not much of an insight but since I have to read this kind of thing for work, I have to squeeze every ounce of reasonableness from it.
. . . is that he knows very well what his role is in this election and he’s not shirking it. Here, for instance, is a message I got from Bernie’s campaign:
I know, and you know, that the best chance for this country is to discuss the issues that matter. Republicans aren’t going to do it, so we need more Democratic debates — more than the four scheduled by the Democratic National Committee before the Iowa Caucuses.
And I know that if Secretary Clinton wants more debates, we’ll get them.
Bernie is well-aware that the election is about getting Hillary elected because she’s the one with the best chances. His campaign messages are insistently telling the supporters, “Hillary is the Big Cheese here, don’t forget who’s really the boss. Hillary gets what she wants. Hillary is in charge.”
And he’s right: we should all work together to let the 10 gentlemen on that stage last Thursday know how very irrelevant and outdated their ideas are.
In the USSR, there were closed borders and no access to any information other than Soviet propaganda. Yet nobody believed the propaganda and spent all day ridiculing the Soviet leadership. People crawled on their knees for food but at least they hated those who reduced them to it.
In today’s Russia, borders are open, foreign travel is available to many, there’s Internet, there’s easy contact with foreigners, there’s satellite TV, etc. Yet everybody believes every word of Putinoid propaganda and worships Putin. They crawl in the dumps and worship the government that makes them do it.
The only conclusion I can reach is that there’s no propaganda, no brainwashing. People simply choose to believe whatever they want to believe at any given time.
So here’s the question: if in the 1980s Soviet people refused to believe in the “evil West”, why do the same people so eagerly believe in it now?
The only answer I have is that in the Soviet times, “the West” offered a fantasy of living in extreme opulence while doing absolutely nothing. And people were unwilling to let any propaganda to rob them of that dream.
Since then, it’s become clear that “the West” of paradisiacal riches and endless leisure does not exist. People feel betrayed by their most cherished dream and engage in the joyful collective excoriation of the traitor.
There’s nothing people enjoy more than hearing what they already know and there’s nothing they detest more than being presented with new information.
We keep hearing that humans don’t use a significant part of their brain but in reality people tend to act as if by the age of 20 they have completely run out of space to store any new information.
Those who manage to avoid total brain ossification into their mature years are few and far between.
Saturday, 7 pm. Everybody is busily at work in my small American town. Construction is going on in several places. The stores, the salons -everything is open.
In Montréal, good luck spotting any movement at a construction site even on a work day. And stores triumphantly close the moment people emerge from the offices.
In this photo, Russians are crawling around a garbage dump trying to salvage the condemned food that hasn’t been burned yet:
Hundreds of tons of meat, fresh produce and cheese are being destroyed in Russia because they supposedly come from the evil West. In the meanwhile, there are more abandoned, hungry children who live in the sreeets and orphanages in Russia today than there was in the aftermath of the civil war back in the 1920s.
Russians say they support Putin because he gave them back their national pride. Of course, it’s hard to see how crawling on your knees in a garbage dump hunting for a few tomatoes is such a hugely proud activity but nationalist sentiments are never guided by reason.
The great thinkers of the Enlightenment with their love of reason came up with a system that exploits those who don’t value reason above all. Nationalism is that system’s name.
A small disclaimer: I know everybody hates my Book Notes series because I only read Spanish books with no English translations these days. But I’m going on vacation next week and I promise I’ll read a bunch of books in English. I have a great lineup of books that you’ll like hearing about. In the meanwhile, it’s not such a horrible thing if you get a glimpse of what’s happening in the Spanish literature, right?
Author: Soledad Puértolas
Title: El fin
Language: Spanish
Year: 2015
My rating: 8 out of 10
Puértolas is another writer from Spain whose work I follow. This year she published a collection of short stories titled The End. These are stories where nothing whatsoever happens, and a careful reader will notice that the writer is doing it very consciously and even makes it clear that this is what she’s doing in the very first story.
As a result, the first few stories are really puzzling. You read them and think, “OK, nothing happens here. What’s the point of all this?” As you keep reading, though, it becomes clear that when taken all together, these short stories have an absolutely devastating impact. They can’t be read separately because they only work as a whole even though they don’t share characters, plot elements, narrative voice, setting, or anything else. It takes an incredible artistic talent to combine – in a very deliberate way – a bunch of meaningless pieces and make them deliver such a massive punch in conjunction.
I’d gladly give the collection 10 out of 10 but there are 3 stories about dogs in it. And I hate dogs. Not even my great admiration for Puértolas’s enormous talent makes me get over my annoyance with the subject of dogs.
This is great literature, though. God, I love Spanish literature.
Clarissa's Blog 