A Russian oligarch lent his “collection of unknown works of Russian avant-garde art” to the Fine Arts Museum in Ghent, Belgium. Formerly unknown works of Malevich, Kandinsky, Popova, Rodchenko, and many others! It sounded too good to be true. And, of course, it was. When the exhibition opened, it turned out that all of the paintings were completely fake.

In the 1990s, unemployed artists created hundreds of these fakes on the orders of the nouveau riche. What’s sad is that an important European museum should be so trusting in its dealings with clearly dishonest and shady characters.

Nature lovers, can you identify these footprints I saw going across our driveway this morning?

They go on and on like this. 

There was a similar situation in Ukraine for over 20 years. Ukrainians, especially from my Eastern part of the country, would go to Russia as illegal immigrants, to work for a pittance with no worker protections, live in horrible conditions, and send money back home. I have cousins and an aunt who did that. 

Then the war started and this practice was tamped down a bit. And now Ukraine is finally developing an economy of its own. People start tiny businesses. There is actual manufacturing. There is a lot of artisanal work. The tourist industry is getting a shot at existing because there is now an actual hospitality sector. Things are so so SO far from perfect but at least now young people in Ukraine aren’t all hopeless and looking to the future of being an illegal maid in Moscow as the pinnacle of achievement.

The point I’m making is that maybe it’s not necessary to take the approach of “we moved 30% of all Salvadorans here and it didn’t work. So let’s move 30% more and see if that goes better.” Or maybe it is. Maybe there’s truly no hope for El Salvador or Haiti. Twenty years ago I was convinced there was no hope for Ukraine, and I was wrong. 

What I hope, though, is that we could have a discussion. Is it really the best idea to dismiss whole regions as completely hopeless and just move people out of there for good? Is there really nothing better for countries like El Salvador? When will be the time to stop foaming at the mouth and start discussing this? Do people really think that posting pictures of Auschwitz on social media is somehow helping Haitians? 

I’m waiting for the foam to recede and for normal, meaningful conversations to start.  

El Salvador, by the way, is “one of the most dangerous places on the planet.” A full one third of Salvadorans don’t live in the country. They live in the US. The economy of El Salvador is heavily dependent on the money immigrants send back from the US. 

MS-13, a terrifying criminal gang of Salvadoran immigrants, originated in LA but has spread all over the US. There is now a significant branch of MS-13 even as far as in Toronto, Canada. Among many other things, MS-13 is collaborating with Mexican drug cartels that are feeding the opioid epidemic in the US. They are also very active in the field of human trafficking, weapons sales, and child prostitution.

Of course, as bad as things are in El Salvador, they are a lot worse in Haiti. 

It’s interesting that El Salvador is being completely erased from the shithole controversy. Its population is inconveniently not black and tends to consider itself white. Plus, there’s an even more inconvenient issue of MS-13. So now its “Haiti and some African nations.” 

It’s very similar to how the discussion of the Brexiters’ anti-immigrant sentiments completely obviates the tensions over the presence in the UK of a large Polish immigrant community. Poles are even whiter than Salvadorans. It’s hard to get any whiter than Poles. So they are erased from the narrative because they simply don’t fit the convenient slogans. 

I just saw an ad for the leading Dem contender for governor. Not only does he have the silly sounding last name of Pritzker, not only is he morbidly obese as if to evoke the image of fat cat billionaires, not only is he a yet another clueless stinky rich guy, he is also phenomenally uncharismatic.

Rauner is very unpopular in the state right now. All we need to get rid of him is a candidate who represents true Dem values. Somebody who doesn’t look completely ridiculous surrounded by welders and school teachers like Pritzker does in this risible ad. Somebody who is a little less entitled. 

Jeez. 

This is the best holiday because N and I get to have a daytime romantic date. Gym! A new German restaurant! A trip to Global Foods! Shopping for groceries is very romantic, especially when it saves me the need to drive to St Louis.

A new controversy! Did Trump say “I” or “I’d”? 

Thank God because the darn shitholes were getting completely out of control. Three days of round-the-clock coverage of such emotional intensity that I wonder just how many people are victims of anal-stage trauma. 

I have no problem with the idea of a canon, and I love Spanish-language literary criticism with its freedom from the empty formulas that so often dominate criticism in English. So I was happy when I was asked to review Pozuelo Yvancos’s Spanish Novel of the 21st Century. It’s a great book, I loved reading it, but what’s really funny is that this critic’s understanding of what constitutes valuable literature is the exact opposite of mine. 

Pozuelo Yvancos is an intense admirer of the deeply postmodern (while passionately rejecting the unprestigious label), with its verbal games, the narrators who are not really narrators but characters narrated by narrating narrators who are not narrators but characters, and the attendant precious cuteness. I agree that this kind of writing has the right to exist and that many people love it and good for them. I honestly can’t stand it, though. I like stories about unemployed carpenters who suffer because they can’t afford to care for their demented old dads. Or journalists who are fired from their jobs and can’t pay bills. Or young people who try to make a living from a patchwork of shitty part-time temp jobs. That kind of thing. Is the narrator really telling about the narrated narrative kind of thing, though, is guaranteed to put me to sleep in under 2 minutes.

Of course, it’s a testimony to Pozuelo Yvancos’s gift as a literary critic that a 400-page book about the kind of literature I don’t read held my attention from start to finish. Great book by a talented author. 

Klara started asking me where that “Clear-eh” person everybody mentions is. I’m trying to explain but I’m not very successful at this point.

And by the way, she already knows how to pronounce our quite complicated last name. She also knows “America”, “Montreal” and “Spain,” for obvious reasons, plus “Indian restaurant” and “Japanese dress.” And N is trying (and failing) to teach her “Putin” because he thinks it will be funny. I don’t see the humor, and apparently Klara doesn’t either.