Somebody.  . . khm, khm . . . adjusted the TV settings so that the image got squished. Now everybody who’s wearing skirts looks like her skirt is very puffy. And everybody wearing pants just got an enormous ass.

The White House Press secretary just used the word “screwed.” Like in “I keep getting screwed” said to Trump by an imaginary rally attendee. Let’s place bets on how soon he moves on to “fucked.”

The press secretary talks about Trump’s meeting with union representatives, about his meeting with business dealers, the future of prescription drug prices, etc. In response, the press corps starts another ridiculous debate about the size of inauguration crowds at different points in history. 

If these folks were paid to make the press look idiotic while making Trump look good, they couldn’t do a better job.

Trump has pulled the plug on TPP. It must have been good, after all. Shit.

Before everybody has plunged into another round of fantasy about Trump weeping in the corner about a hilarious gif they shared on Twitter, let me mention that he just announced that he’s cutting environmental regulations dramatically. 

Now let’s go back to discussing how he’s too crazy and pathetic to do much harm.

P.S. And yet they are still going on about the crowd sizes. I wonder if anybody is even going to notice the point about the environmental regulations. 

Maybe I’m naïve, but I can’t see what benefit the Trump Administration is gaining from picking a fight over the estimates of the comparative crowd sizes.

Distracting attention from the dismantling of the ACA that started on the same day and nobody fucking noticed or cared about, that’s what. 

Here, solved the mystery for you. 

A small clue: whenever it looks like Trump is getting overwrought, wounded, offended, angry or hurt, it means he’s putting on a show while his hand is in your pocket cleaning you out. 

It’s a show. He’s a massively successful TV star. Are people ever going to wake up?

It was such a tragedy that Chirbes died right after publishing his masterpiece On the Edge and achieving the holy grail of writers everywhere and being translated into English. 

I was so sad for his death and heartbroken that I’d never get to read anything else by him.

But then! News got out that a new novel by Chirbes was to be published posthumously. He’d been writing it for 20 years! Completed it days before his death!! The culmination of his life’s work!!! The writer’s last words to his fans of many years!!!!

With shaking hands and bated breath I downloaded the book onto my Kindle and. . .

I could have gone all my life without reading this novel and missed nothing at all. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent gay romance novel. I’m guessing that possibly Chirbes was trying to come out by writing it. In 1976 this novel would have been a big deal but today nobody cares who’s gay or not. Chirbes already wrote a novel like this, it was his very first one, and it was just as blah. He’s at his best when he’s most political, and “ooh, look at me, I just said the word ‘gay’, how shocking” is not what he’s good at.

I’m seriously not seeing anything in this novel that needed to be worked on for 20 years. 

What is the greatest dream of every writer in the world? No, it’s not the Nobel. The Nobel is just a pathway to this holy grail, this pinnacle of achievement. Without this one thing, you aren’t even a real writer, no matter how famous you are or how many copies you sell or how many awards you get in your native Mexico, Russia, Spain, Morocco, or Japan.

My currently most favorite writer in the world, Rafael Chirbes, was about to reach this shining pinnacle of writerly success when he died of lung cancer. He still got it, of course, but posthumously. 

More about Chirbes’s last book in the next post. 

Klara pressed a sequence of random buttons on the remote and ended up with the series The Crown. I have no interest in the British royal family but I will watch anything with John Lithgow because he’s crazy talented. And once again a TV actor. There is so much talent on TV and none on the big screen. It’s a mystery. 

There is a short story by Anton Chekhov about a governmental office in tsarist Russia where the supervisor constantly abused his underlings. He bullied, humiliated, and harassed the clerks on a daily basis, but there was nothing they could do.

It was customary that during holidays clerks would visit their bosses’ houses to wish them well. It was a form of further humiliating them because even on what was supposed to be a day of rest the clerks had to waste most of the day trudging to the boss’s house, sitting for hours in the waiting room until he deigned to see them, and suffering even more insults from him.

So in the short story, the poor abused clerks had to go through this pathetic procedure on a festive day. After they finally left the boss’s house, the clerk who was the boss’s favorite victim, the one who got harassed and humiliated the most often, started laughing hysterically.

“What’s going on?” the other clerks asked. “What’s so funny?”

“While we were in the waiting room,” the clerk said, “I moved one of the figurines on the mantelpiece. It was on the left and I moved it to the right! I showed him! I finally showed this bastard!!!”

And the clerk laughed loudly and happily.

I keep thinking of this story when I read this sort of thing:

I take it Hair Führer is angry that people are dissing his inauguration because of the subdued size of the crowd. Very likely the YUGE demonstrations today really rubbed it in.

Yeah, you showed the bastard who’s boss. He’ll never get over that figurine.

P.S. And here is another happy clerk who moved a figurine. This is literally painful to read.