When I was an undergraduate student in Hispanic Studies at McGill, a semester lasted 12 weeks. This means that we were assigned 〰 10 novels or equivalent to read per course. And after my first semester, I always had 6 courses per semester. 

And it wasn’t all that hard. Yes, it was a lot of reading but it was incredible fun and I was enjoying it massively. And now I defy anybody to find a remotely important text in my field that I haven’t read. (Except for Cortazar’s Rayuela. That one defeated me.)

I’d love to teach this kind of courses. I did once, back at Cornell, but that was years ago. I can’t do it now for various reasons. First of all, I can’t make students buy 10 books in Spanish. We don’t make them buy books at all. It helps students financially but the downside is that they end up never seeing anything but the stupid textbooks by greedy educational publishers that we rent out to them. 

Another problem is that the program is set up in a way that delays the students’ encounter with reading literature for as long as possible. Even the Intro to Literature course is 1/3 grammar. And this tendency keeps growing. Students are given more and more prerequisites (language courses) they need to complete before they are deemed ready to read anything but a two-page excerpt. When they finally complete the prerequisites, it’s time to graduate, so that’s that. I’ve tried to combat the prerequisite mania but it’s useless. The nasty things keep mushrooming.

Of course, there is also the issue of habit. It’s one thing to say to somebody “Read this novel by the end of the week” when that person has been doing that her whole life anyway. But it’s quite different when the habit is not there. 

I don’t get people who are obsessed with finding out Elena Ferrante’s real name. What will it change to know that her name is Anita Raja as opposed to Bubita Baja or Kubita Saja? What will the details of her life contribute to the enjoyment or understanding of her work?

This is nothing but lazy readership that characterizes people who need to engage with everything as if it were a story in a cheap tabloid.

P.S. I especially like the triumphant “And she didn’t even grow up in the same family as her character!” As if she were supposed to. Gosh, I wonder what these folks will feel when they discover that the author of Anna Karenina not only didn’t throw himself under a train but wasn’t even a woman.

At Klara’s daycare, they have a system where every day all groups are introduced to a word in Spanish and then all the daily activities revolve around that word. 

The most recent word they “learned” is “agua”, or water. I didn’t tell anybody about this because it’s not huge news that you want to share. 

And today my sister texted me that she had a dream where I brought Klara to visit her, and Klara saw water and said “AGUA.” 

My sister and I always read each other’s minds like this. 

At least, the employees at Trump’s policy headquarters in Washington quit after he refused to pay them. Back in our post-Soviet countries, they’d keep coming to work for the next decade. 

There is even a Russian joke where a businessman tells his buddy, “I haven’t paid my workers in a year but they keep coming. I don’t know how to make them go away!”

“Hey, have you tried charging them for showing up to work?” the buddy asks.