Today I drove Klara to school.

Then I drove to Walgreens to get a pink pool noodle.

Then I drove to a diner to get breakfast because I now can eat diner food.

Then I drove to the post office to mail a package.

Then I drove home because N wanted me to check if he’d left his wallet at home.

Then I drove to a gas station.

Then I drove to the mechanic to repair my car’s AC.

Then I drove to another post office that accepts passport applications.

Then I drove to the Global Foods store.

Then I drove back home.

Then I drove to pick Klara up.

Then I drove us to the swimming pool.

And then I drove us home.

And that’s when I realized I had crossed over to the dark side and became part of the car culture.

Boys are also paid more allowance than girls for doing chores, according to a recent analysis of 10,000 families that use BusyKid, a chore app. Boys using the app earned twice what girls did for doing chores — an average of $13.80 a week, compared with girls’ $6.71.

I can’t decipher this passage no matter how hard I try. Parents pay money to their kids? Through an app? Six dollars? A week? How old are these kids that they can use an app but still need six bucks a week so badly? It’s less than a dollar a day. How do these conversations go?

“Mom, I need money.’

“Here, do the dishes and I’ll send you ninety cents through an app.”

“Oh, fuck you, you fussy old cow.”

Doesn’t the smartphone where the app is presumably located cost more than that?

On a more serious note, N asked me combatively if we were going to make Klara do chores and I gave him a murderous look and explained that in Ukrainian villages when a young girl tried to do something around the house, she was told to go brush her hair instead because once she got married her mother-in-law was going to make her do chores, and she should enjoy her life in the meantime, so that was the end of that discussion.

All of this talk about Lithuanian bread made me feel like gobbling some Lithuanian bread. So I got a bunch:

It’s deeply bizarre to care about Balderson winning in Ohio when there will be a rematch in a few weeks. It’s so close that he will probably lose in November anyway.

I saw an idea for a board game called “Friendship at 40+” on a website I read. Everybody gets a card with an activity (picnic, movies, barbecue, drinks, birthday party, etc) and in under 10 seconds has to come up with an excuse for why they can’t come.

For academics, it can’t be switched up for committees and meetings.

It’s been weeks since the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki. The invasion of Mariupol never materialized. I can only conclude that Trump gave Putin nothing. This is real evidence. Everything else is idle social media blabber.

The novel is very recent, so there is no translation yet. I’m sure there will be because this author gets translated, although I have no idea what the title can be in English. (Moronga is a very vulgar Central American term for a penis.)

It’s a fantastic book, folks. Castellanos Moya is definitely part of the new generation of Latin American writers I talked about earlier this summer who write about Latin America honestly, directly, and without the cloying cutesiness of the Boom and the post-Boom. The writing is also a lot more realist than anything we’ve seen from the previous generations, which I definitely like.

In Moronga, a Salvadoran professor teaching at a US college goes to the archives to do research on a famous poet. But he’s Salvadoran, so of course the journey to the archives in DC ends in a shootout in Chicago between drug gangs.

This is a novel about immigrants who, whether exquisitely educated or barely literate, exist in a world of their own, feeling puzzled and intimidated by everything around them. A legal status, a fancy job, education and credentials do nothing to stave off the terror because its source is not anything we usually suspect. You know that old expression, sticking out like sore thumbs? Salvadorans in this novel are the sorest of thumbs. That is, until you get to the part about Guatemalans.

From a very worthwhile article:

The important thing is to be interesting. What better way to demonstrate that you’re not a humdrum worker bee, afflicted with a lackluster personality, than to carefully and selectively express the right kind of righteous indignation?

Yes, it’s all about showcasing your quirk.

What’s really missing from my life is an opportunity to teach Castellanos Moya’s Moronga in class. And it’s not because he’s Central American and I’m a Peninsularist. I could create a really great course on novels about ETA on the one hand and Central American guerrilla on the other.

Instead I get to teach “my name is, today is Tuesday, how are you?”, which nobody needs a PhD or even a Master’s to do. I don’t care about teaching the way I do about research, so I’m not massively heartbroken about this. It would be fun to do something at least a bit challenging in the classroom, that’s all.

As I read Castellanos Moya, I keep thinking how wonderful it is that, unlike literature in English, books written in Spanish are not castrated by fear of Twitter mobs, charges of cultural appropriation or political incorrectness, fretting over representation and identity, and the rest of the ridiculous garbage we keep seeing in the English-speaking world.

This truly phenomenal Salvadoran writer I recently discovered writes with such freedom and such evident joy that I can only hope that its fear of artistic freedom and of language is something this country never manages to export.