Opinions, art, debate
OK, folks, do you want to know why I was rejected for insurance coverage?
Apparently, on my visit to my doctor last December I reported “excessive alcohol consumption.” What I did report was one drink every six months or so. But hey, whatever a person with a Russian – sounding last name says about alcohol, what everybody hears is “alcoholic”, right?
The funniest thing is that the idiot doctor who reported this also has a Russian – sounding last name. He must be a total alkie.
Every once in a while, people write to ask me this question, so I decided to answer here:
YALE.
Yes, seriously. Here is why:
1. They have the best funding. Cornell’s funding is almost as good but the place is depressive. Harvard has a great package but they don’t push you out fast enough. Brown is spotty in terms of funding. I don’t know about Princeton because whenever I ask, people who’ve gone there go to a very dark place in their minds and take forever to emerge.
2. The reputation of the school helps you get hired. It’s not a guarantee but it helps.
3. The library will blow your mind.
4. The program is very undemanding. And before you curl your nose, consider how great it must be not to be given useless hoops to jump through as you make your way towards your goal.
5. Nobody was accepted into the program this year, so the department will be eager to admit good, promising people.
6. And most importantly: I’m always here to give you helpful suggestions on how to handle being in the program.
I hated my experience at Yale. But that was nobody’s fault but my own. I had a set of naive, childish expectations both about the university and the country that buried me under the shards when they were smashed.
If you remember that this is a very poor and ugly region and abandon the idiotic fantasy of famous professors who will mentor you, listen to you, and talk to you, you will be much happier. Any hope of finding yourself part of a community of scholars, people who will have profound conversations with you, who will not shower you with endless platitudes should be abandoned immediately.
The best one can hope for – at Yale or anywhere – is to find one or two people who are in tune with you and will help you not to feel completely lonely.
Learn to work alone, use the Internet for meaningful discussions, identify those two intelligent people on campus you will enjoy being around, learn to smile vapidly through endless conversations about nothing, come up with your own career plan, try to find a mentor somewhere on the planet, and you’ll be fine.
And remember: this is the most rewarding, wonderful career ever. The prize awaiting you is huge, so keep your eyes on the reward and let that help you through.
I don’t tend to make the private emails I receive public but I’ve got to share this one:
Dear, have you eve thought about making your excellent blog about Our Brain and the Mystique of Hard-wiring available to foreign language speakers? I’m from Vietnam and could easily translate it in to Slovak for you.
Huh? Or as we say in Ukraine, tyuuuuuu*!
* The famous Ukrainian “tyu” is an interjection that can transmit any meaning and an enormous range of emotion, depending on the intonation and facial expression that accompanies it.
Prudential has denied my application for long-term disability insurance and is refusing to tell me the reason “because of security considerations.”
It was obvious from the start that the company was extremely reluctant to grant the coverage because, according to the terms of their agreement with our university, they are supposed to grant this particular coverage very cheaply.
Did I tell you how much I hate insurance companies? I only got into this whole long-term disability insurance hunt because N believes that it’s crucial to have it. But Prudential was resorting to such dirty tricks from the start that I knew it as useless.
Every great new book is a revelation. A novel like Purity will be discussed and debated. If the book is as good as Franzen’s first two novels than a new set of ideas will enter our cultural bloodstream.
Great book? Ideas? Our culture? Has the world gone insane? Franzen produces mildly entertaining beach and airport reads that have fuck – all to do with culture and ideas. The main characteristic of his writing is its extraordinary reliance on clichés and an utter lack of originality.
Franzen ‘ s novel The Corrections, for instance, revolves around the hoariest stereotypes about the degenerate, cynical, promiscuous East Coasters and the simple – minded, salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners.
One of the novel’s characters is a college professor who is fired when the administration discovers that she falsified her PhD diploma. The students protest, though, and the professor is not only reinstated but also immediately awarded a full professorship. This happens because she is a lesbian Filipina, and, as we all know, universities award full professorships to lesbian Filipinas without PhDs all the time. Beware the evils of political correctness!
I started reading Purity, and the first 100 pages are all about Franzen clumsily channeling 50 Shades of Grey. There is this creepily flirtatious email correspondence between a mysterious, rich, older man and an innocent and bumbling 23 – year-old girl. Franzen has written the novel from the young woman’s perspective which, in a male writer, is always a sign of age-related libidinal depletion. As usual, Franzen goes for the banal 100% of time.
The novel is not bad, however. There is some goofy toilet humor, as in a scene where the protagonist is so desperate to pee that she drops a cake she’s baked onto the scuzzy bathroom floor. That’s funny, in a way, but culture? Ideas?
People are so ignorant and have such undeveloped tastes that they think McDonald’s is a restaurant, Breaking Bad is art, Hunger Games is literature, Trump is a politician, and Franzen is a creator of ideas.
The way Kindle books work is that you have the option of seeing the passages other readers have considered especially valuable. If more than 2 people have highlighted a quote, you can see it.
In Jonathan Franzen ‘ s novel The Corrections there are very few highlighted quotes. That’s not surprising since the novel is an exercise in extreme superficiality. One passage, however, struck the readers as so important that hundreds of them underlined it.
In the passage, the protagonist is thinking about her middle-aged children, and arrives at the following tragic realization:
They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.
When I think of those hundreds of stupid dumbasses who felt compelled to highlight the earth – shattering bit of news that 40 – year-old people are human beings even though they are somebody’s children, I feel very sad.
People create all kinds of idiocies to torture themselves and others instead of simply enjoying life. Your children are alive? Healthy? Then just unclench already, you stupid fuck, and go do something useful with your life instead of lamenting the very evidence that they exist.
So as I was telling you yesterday, once the planned economy of the USSR collapsed, the Soviet men collectively gave up and, in a way reminiscent of Faulknerian women, refused to accept the new reality. Of course, there was also a bandit class that serviced the needs of the apparatchik class but those had always existed and were fine with the changes that they had engineered themselves.
There were exceptions – my Dad, N.’s Dad – men who left their non-paying Soviet jobs, started their own businesses, and enjoyed making money. They were very exceptional, however. All of my friends’ fathers, men you would call “educated professionals”, refused even to try to feed themselves, let alone their families. The need to look for a job, offer their services, go to job interviews was something they perceived as profoundly humiliating.
Most families survived thanks to the women. There were isolated cases where women were as infantilized as men, and then the entire family either had to find somebody else to feed them or would get pauperized. For instance, my schoolmate’s parents both decided to check out and sit vapidly on the couch all day long. The entire family of 7 had to be fed by the elderly grandpa, a World War II veteran who was less beaten down than his 35-year-old son and who started a business of his own to put food on the table. Today, the grandpa is dead but the son is still refusing to work. Fortunately for him, this is now the problem of the government of Canada where the family resides.
I’m not sure whether I need to point out that unemployment benefits did not exist, and the men who checked out of active employment brought no income whatsoever. This would not even be the worst thing, though. What was really intolerable was that they didn’t just sit on their couches quietly, waiting peacefully to be fed and clothed. No, they made sure that everybody else in the family suffered as much as possible. Their greatest resentment was reserved for those who actually worked and supported them.
The way this would look, most often, is that the wife would come home from her three jobs and proceed to do the household chores (we are not a culture where men are capable even of boiling some water for their own tea). In the meanwhile, the man, who spent all day long sighing in front of the TV (we are not a culture where men do any child care), would start to scold, nag and pester her with things like, “Ah, so now you are too important to spend any time with your family,” “All you care about is money,” “What kind of a horrible mother would leave her kids to run around God knows where all day long?”, “The house is a pig-sty, and you are not even around to do any cleaning.”
Another classmate of mine had a Dad who guilt-tripped not only the poor overworked wife but even the kids. I once saw him stand over his own 7-year-old daughter as she tried to eat, berating her in a monotonous voice for eating too much and being a huge drain on the family finances. The man’s explanation for not working was that he was too sensitive, intellectual and spiritual to waste his energies on the evil capitalist market. The elder daughter had to start working at the age of 14, helping her mother haul huge sacks of canned good the women were peddling at the black market. And in the same monotonous voice, Daddy would scold the daughter for spending too little time on her homework.
These were not all middle-aged men. My first husband perceived the need to look for a job as impossibly traumatic even though he was in his early (and then mid, and then late) twenties. Gradually, he slipped into all of the nagging, guilt-tripping, showily depressive behaviors of the older post-Soviet men.
This was a phenomenon that knew no generational, ethnic, or class boundaries. The men in question were striking against the need to be adult men. The role they claimed for themselves was that of children, and they would feel resentment towards the wives who wouldn’t recognize their status as babies and their own children who’d claim the role of babies for themselves.
A little boy in Germany was asked if there are any foreigners in his preschool.
“No, there are just kids,” he said.
The best way to defeat any possibility of social change is to pit different groups of population against each other. Working class whites in America were sold the idea that their impoverishment is caused by the “lazy” blacks or “job-stealing” Mexicans. As a result, they joyfully forgot about any questions they might have had for those better off than they are and ganged up against those who are as deprived and oppressed.
The same sad evolution has occurred with the Black Lives Matter movement. What started as a crucially important conversation about racism, devolved into a meaningless and hopeless “police officers are evil” narrative. The message of “Darren Wilson is a racist murderer” was swapped for “Darren Wilson is a policeman”, which is the most self-defeating narrative any movement can come up with.
And we are also seeing this logic eagerly adopted by professional middle classes. The erosion of the middle class is blamed on educated immigrants, and this destroys any possibility of solidarity and does nothing but distract everybody from doing anything but hating, blaming, and fantasizing about deportations.
Back in 2012, the long-beleaguered Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania ran out of money — literally — and the unionized teachers and staff agreed to work without pay. Well, it’s happened again — at least the part about the district being out of cash and all of the teachers, support staff, bus drivers and other adults in the system agreeing to work for free.
No, no, Americans, not you, too. Back in Ukraine in the 1990s, I remember feeling so much rage and disgust towards the people who would agree to work for free (sometimes for a year or longer) that I realized that if I didn’t leave the country, I would inflict grave bodily harm on someone.
But at least the post-Soviet people had an excuse. They had collectively woken up in an entirely different country without any warning. They were traumatized and severely depressed as a result of this shattering transformation. They are still stupid, irresponsible idiots who preferred to deprive their own children of basic necessities rather than get a grip on themselves and go find paying work but at least there is an explanation for their passivity.
Americans, though! People who have not been infantilized by a totalitarian regime that, for decades, eliminated and persecuted anybody with the entrepreneurial spirit! People whose courageous workers’ movements transformed labor conditions throughout the civilized world! You, too, are patiently trudging to work for free, setting a horrible precedent for your colleagues everywhere? And there is not a single person among all these unionized workers with enough self-respect to refuse to be humiliated and exploited in this way?
This is profoundly disappointing. If people who have not known any real hardship (compared to how the rest of the world lives) are so pathetic and beaten down, then it becomes unclear what needs to happen for anybody to recover any human dignity.
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