Talking about the book, the UP I’m publishing with this time differs from the one I published with before in that it’s become part of a huge publishing house. 

The positive results of this are that the book will be prettier and they will promote it more actively. 

On the negative side, I have to bother with copyright and I’ll only get 3 (like in THREE) author copies. Plus, the book will cost some insane amount. Probably with the goal of ensuring that nobody ever reads it. 

Big companies, what can you do. There is no logic to what they do. If they priced the book at $10, I’d sell a ton of copies for them. But selling doesn’t seem to be what they want. 

Everybody here knows that I have written a book on Spain’s crisis literature, right? And that by “crisis” I mean the profound transformation in the nature of the nation-state that we’ve been discussing here on the blog?

OK, so I’ve been looking to see if anybody’s written any crisis literature in English and guess what? I finally found a crisis novel by an Irish writer.

Tana French is one of many female writers who are terrified of their talent and try to make it as small and unnoticeable as possible by hiding it in mystery, romance, fantasy, erotica, YA, or something of the kind. Like those female scholars who put enormous amounts of work into one collected volume after another because writing whole book in their own voice feels too daring.

French is gifted and scared of her giftedness, so she writes police procedurals. And one of them – called Broken Harbor – is a crisis novel. And it’s as harsh as the crisis. Forget the mystery elements, they are neither here nor there. But this author finally speaks about something that matters and does it in a very powerful way. If you do read it, remember not to take it literally but as a metaphor for what is going on.

Very good, very highly recommended.

Today is the day of Remembrance of the victims of Holodomor in Ukraine. If there were a way to argue somehow that Americans were to blame for it, then it would flatter them and they’d care. There’d be funding to study it, professorial positions in Ukrainian studies, discussions in the press. But since nobody has found a way to make it about them, they don’t give a toss.

Yes, Trump will build his border wall. Most of it is already built.
Instead of the constant “OMG, how could he say that!” during the campaign, we should have heard non-stop that the wall is mostly there already, that the Obama administration has been deporting illegal immigrants faster than anybody else, that the number of illegal immigrants stopped growing back in 2010. 

And it’s not like anybody ever tried to present a convincing argument why the wall is a bad thing. There was nothing done in response to the promise of a wall but scandalized, prissy pearl-clutching.

If people want the wall and it’s mostly there already, then why not play to that and give them what they want?

“From building a world class health and education system, to Cuba’s record of international solidarity abroad, Castro’s achievements were many.”

This is from Mr Corbyn, than vile, cruel piece of trash. I most sincerely hope that when this bastard dies, demons in hell make him experience Cuba’s world-class system of torture known as Cuban healthcare for all eternity. 

Corbyn goes on to praise Cuba’s actions in Angola. I remember how a man with a limp and a scarred face approached me in Havana. 

“I don’t want anything from you,” he said. “I simply need to tell this to someone.” For the next 2 hours he walked next to me, telling me about being beaten, threatened and blackmailed to force him to go to Angola. And then forced to engage in horrible things in Angola. And then doomed to live with constant pain from his wounds after he came back because there is no medical care. And still threatened and humiliated so that he wouldn’t talk about it.

These pieces of stinking garbage like Corbyn live their whole lives in opulence and never take the trouble of looking in the eyes of those who pay the tragic price of their idiotic rich-boy fantasies. Their obliviousness and indifference to others rises to the level of sociopathy.