My parents are celebrating their 42nd wedding anniversary today, and my mother told me that at the wedding, many of the guests came up to them to say the marriage wasn’t likely to survive and they’d be divorced in a couple of years. The kindness and good manners of Soviet people are unparalleled.

The reason for the guests’ scepticism regarding the marriage was that my parents were of different ethnicities and social classes. 

By the way, my mother’s five sisters all married within their ethnicity and social class. All got divorced. 

Somebody on FB was commenting on this article and said, very correctly, that the practice of legally changing birth certificates to make them state facts that were clearly untrue began when birth parents were erased from birth certificates and adoptive parents were placed there instead. And nobody seemed to fucking care that the very existence of something like truth, history and facts was denied by these acts. 

Is there some new foodie fad happening with “ancient grains”? A bunch of stuff at the grocery store has suddenly been given “ancient grains” labels. I’ve been buying this stuff for years, and suddenly it’s all ancient grains. And I’m not as old as to believe that the food has become ancient together with me. 

I even saw “ancient grains” eclairs today. It seems a tad off-putting to see the word “ancient” attached to such a highly perishable food. 

Gosh, people are so weird.

The New York Times reports that, in the areas devastated by drug addiction, it’s hard for companies to find workers even for good-paying blue-collar jobs with benefits. It’s a vicious circle where many people turned to drugs after losing their jobs in the recession of 2007-12, but now when the economy has finally picked up, they can’t go back to work because their bodies have been colonized by drugs.

The especially sad part of the story is the number of young people who, instead of pursuing their dreams in the most energetic and productive season of their lives, have become useless, sad potheads. Obviously, a choice in favor of vegetating uselessly instead of discovering the world and making it your own isn’t made in a vacuum.

The US and Russia are now trying out concerted attacks on Ukraine. President Trump attacks Ukraine verbally, while Putin has stepped up the military aggression and is surrounding the country on 3 sides with more Russian troops. 

In the end, Ukraine will prevail, and so will American democracy. But there will be absolutely unnecessary losses in the process.

There is no new intellectual renewal challenge because I’m using my move to a new office for this purpose. I almost completed the move in just one day. Now I just have to wash the floor and move in the ancient hanging files that I never use but that have to follow me around for some unknown reason.

I came to this university before the digitalization, so I had a mountain of old paperwork to dispose of. It was so enjoyable to ditch all the merit folders and pre-tenure reports. Of course, everything has its positive and negative sides, and this move has them, too.

Positives:

1. The new office has a window. We have no windows in the classrooms, and I didn’t love being deprived of natural light the entire time I was at work.
2. Moving to a new office gives me a chance to go over my teaching materials and ditch everything I don’t need. I ended up disposing of 95% of my teaching materials because I love making up new stuff and I hate teaching the same thing all over and over again.
3. The new office has a huge soft armchair that will help me read in the office.
4. I got a chance to arrange everything in the new office to fit my new goals in my profession.
5. The new office has many more bookshelves.
6. The new office has no history of dead birds falling from the ceiling.

Negatives:

1. The new office doesn’t have a closet with coat hangers for the coat, shoes, dresses, and blouses. Until mid-October, I will have to change at least once (and ideally twice) at work because I don’t lecture, I work with students who are talking in small groups. I have to come very close to them and, sorry for the TMI, but I don’t want to reek of sweat when I do that.
2. I will now have neighbors. Not inside my office, of course, but in offices next to me. My former office was very isolated and I could blast my trashy Russian TV shows where people yell Russian obscenities at each other while I prepped and graded. Now I won’t be able to do that because it will disturb the neighbors. (I detest earphones).
3. The colleagues will finally discover what a lazy layabout I am. But it’s too late because I already have tenure.

Tomorrow I will complete the move and post photos of the new office.

When I see preachy, smug bumper stickers like “Jesus was a refugee”, I want to slap one saying “Jesus was also male. So what?” right under it. 

What racists have to say about the Gilmore Girls sequel. Note the utter incapacity to notice the global economic crisis that occured between the two parts of the show. 

I found the curious review by clueless racists in this outlandishly bad piece from BuzzFeed. It’s all about flattering the vanity of some crazy old git but at least it led me all the way to the clueless racists. 

Hans Fallada’s 1933 novel Little Man, What Now? was an immediate bestseller. It was turned into movies both in Germany and, unfortunately for the writer, in the US. Hitler didn’t appreciate the novel’s success in “Jew-owned Hollywood” and the novel’s humanization of Jews. 

Little Man is not a major work of art like Fallada’s Wolf Among Wolves. It’s a comforting, easy-to-read, deeply cute novel that was supposed to comfort the 6,000,000 unemployed in Germany of that time and all those people who feared becoming indigent. It’s very masterfully done, and it spoke to people who were about to start throwing their arms up in the Nazi salute and marching their neighbors into concentration camps. 

Fallada wrote obsessively about the rise of Hitler (without ever mentioning Hitler, of course) because what else was there to write about for a German author in the 1930s? In Little Man he points to capitalism as the culprit of Nazism swift rise. The characters of the novel vacillate between Nazism and Communism but, since Stalin had chosen to doom German Communism, Nazism prevailed. 

I dislike all parallels between the rise of German Nazism and what we are seeing today but Little Man is a document of its time that spoke to people and the parallels are eerie. If you were planning to read Snyder’s book on the rise of totalitarianism, read this novel instead. 

Another great link from Alex’s Facebook is this article on how relativism came to bite its proponents in their smug, dumb asses. This lesson would be funny if it weren’t costing us all so dearly. 

Also, I picked up New Yorker after a break and was very pleasantly surprised. There is, for instance, a very good article on Trump supporters in Colorado: “People have reasons for the things that they believe, and the intensity of their experiences can’t be taken for granted; it’s not simply a matter of having Fox News on in the background. But perhaps this is a way to distinguish between the President and his supporters. Almost everybody I met in Grand Junction seemed more complex, more interesting, and more decent than the man who inspires them.” Don’t pay attention to the dumb subtitle. It was changed from the print version.  

There is also a very interesting piece titled “American Inferno” which one can use to teach students how dangerous it is to trust a first-person narrative. 

As you can see, all 3 links point to the danger of deifying “experience and individual perspective.”