In the USSR, there existed a tradition of not telling people about their terminal diagnoses. I always thought this was wrong because people deserve to know the truth about themselves, all that crap.

But now I’m thinking about my friend who died two weeks ago. What did she gain from knowing her diagnosis for 4 years? She’d been a happy person the day before she was told. It’s not a way of speaking. She was incandescently happy about her life.

And the day after the diagnosis, she was just as sick but now her life was effectively over. All she could think about was the diagnosis. What was the point of stealing those remaining years from her? Or having her undergo an extremely painful back surgery when she had 3 months left to live and the surgery wasn’t going to do anything to reduce the tumors?

What was the point of all this? She had barely any symptoms and no pain except for what was caused by these useless treatments. And any months or years she gained because of the treatments, she was so miserable that it wasn’t really life. Which is what she said, so it’s not my assumption.

And if we accept that a mental state has an impact on one’s physical state, how does it help to make a person severely depressed? I honestly can’t imagine that it helped her fight cancer to sit and brood about the injustice of it all.

I honestly don’t know what the answer is. What do you think?

There is this anti-Putin shaman in Siberia who thinks he can rid the country of Putin with his magical incantations.

Putin sent 40 heavily armed special ops guys to arrest the unarmed middle-aged shaman. Why? Because he thinks that shaman’s magical incantations actually work.

Yes, he’s that stupid.

Now, in the best Soviet tradition, the poor shaman will be institutionalized and force-fed psychotropics until he goes completely mad.

The shaman had a lot of popular support, by the way. People in his region still live in medieval times.

Klara loves the Kids Night Out at school. It’s a sort of a babysitting thing where you can leave the kids at school from 6:30 to 10:30 pm and have a date night with your husband. The kids get a movie and a pizza, build forts out of pillows, and make art. Klara is indifferent to pizza (“because it makes my mouth all spicy, mommy. I’d rather have a salad instead”) and is too young to enjoy a movie. She loves the pillow forts and the art, though.

“Mommy, don’t come to get me too early,” she says. “I want to stay playing with my friends.”

“But I miss you so much,” I explain. “This is why I come early.”

“It’s ok, mommy,” she says soothingly. “I have a brilliant idea. I’ll draw you a picture, and it will be beautiful, with a lot of glitter. So you can play with the picture while I’m away, and you won’t be bored!”

I’m only half-done with the book, but I’m so enthusiastic about it that I can’t help saying something about it already.

First, a small disclaimer. I’m a huge fan of Rushdie’s and I’m positively predisposed to anything he writes. Even so, I think Quichotte is the best novel of his that I have read. It’s on the Booker Prize short list, and it’s definitely well-deserved, although I believe he has a very strong competitor on that list.

The novel has two strands. One has to do with a sort of a rewriting of Don Quixote, as is clear from the title. The second is about Indians and the opioid epidemic. Rushdie is amazing at writing about Indians. I’m not sure I understand his decision to make the Sacklers Indian and attribute the evil they did to an immigrant’s lack of respect for borders and boundaries, including those of a moral sort. But his writing about opioids doesn’t feel opportunistic or exploitative.

The Quixote part seemed strained and unnecessary at first. It’s filled with all sorts of Resister-type rhetoric, so I couldn’t get into it at first. But the deeper it gets, the less annoying it becomes. I’m still forcing myself not to leaf through the Quixote parts to get to the Indians but it’s getting easier.

Still, I can already see it’s a wonderful, wonderful novel from a really amazing writer.

There is another interesting place where Harvey intersects with social conservatives. As we think about the impotence of all these proposals that aim to change our economic system but end up strengthening its worst attributes, we’ve got to ask, but then what? What can we do? There are clearly massive problems with this form of capitalism. If we don’t like it, what can we do?

At this point, Harvey says – and I wholeheartedly agree – that we need to look at our way of being in the world. Money isn’t just bank notes. It’s a system of social relations. We need to change those social relations if we want any real change. Any mass-scale debt-forgiveness or welfare payout will leave us more indebted than before because that’s how we are. If my mortgage (which is my only debt) were paid out in full by a magic fairy tomorrow, you know what I’d do the day after? I’d buy a larger house, which I totally don’t need. And a swimming pool and a new car and a ton of books and a trip to Europe. That’s what we all would do and find convincing excuses to justify it. And hey, I’m among the more financially responsible among us because I haven’t had a dime in credit card debt for years and zero car debt or student loan debt ever. Most people are a lot more out of control than I am.

This is why Harvey talks about the human nature. There is a lot of variety, he says, in how human nature can manifest itself. It can also evolve. Shit’s not gonna change until we stop defining ourselves as consuming, purchasing, accumulating individuals. This won’t be solved by government intervention or the hidden hand of whatever.

Sorry, have to run to my book club. More later.

Our university doesn’t give us a book allowance, obviously. And it’s useless to ask for any books that can be used in research for our faculty book clubs. We are, however, allowed to ask for books that improve our teaching. Because we are supposed to be always improving our teaching.

After 10 years of attending faculty book clubs that discuss such hoary old topics as flipped classrooms, the oppressiveness of merit, and the importance of assessment, I’ve just about had it with these clubs.

But then a colleague had a brilliant idea. He told the administration that our book club urgently needs to read David Harvey’s new book Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason because it will tell us how to adjust our pedagogy better to serve students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Yeah, it’s ridiculous but the administration bought it and provided copies of the book. Unlike the ever-popular subject of flipped classrooms that attracts crowds, our David Harvey book club only attracted 4 people.

The first meeting is today and I’m preparing. The book is very good, folks. It’s probably my favorite book by Harvey so far. What I find new and fascinating to me is that it turns out Marx knew abd said from the start that industrial capitalists – those who manufacture stuff – are ultimately going to be the losers of the capitalist game. The laws of capital reproduction mandate that capital eventually should try to get rid of labor altogether.

A point comes when labor costs become too stable for any large jolts. And that stability is something that deeply antithetical to what capitalism is. What this means is that the current developments – the primacy of finance over productions, the destruction of manufacturing, and everything we call neoliberalism – was inevitable.

Of course, there are things Marx could have never predicted like, for instance, the ever important land losing in importance to something like intellectual property rights.

A fascinating, very easy to read book.

More on the book to follow.

“Mommy, Mommy!” exclaims Klara. “I have amazing news! Letters c and k make the same noise!”

————-

The priest’s wife had her birthday today. Klara counted 7 candles on the birthday cake.

“Joan is turning 7 years old today,” she informed everybody.

The popadiya was very happy about this interpretation.

There’s this children’s book called “Everybody Is Cooking Rice.” At first, it’s cute. A girl visits every house on her street and sees that everybody is making a rice dish for dinner.

“The Diazes are from Mexico. They came here a year ago. They are cooking rice!

“The Bahns are from Vietnam. They came here 3 months ago. They are cooking rice!”

As the book goes on, though, it gets creepy. Everybody is from someplace else. Everybody just came here 5 minutes ago. Everybody barely speaks English.

By the end of the book, you fully expect to find a Trump campaign sticker attached to the last page asking people to donate money if they don’t want to be replaced.

This is the first book in a long time that I finished de un tirón. What do you call it in English? In one sitting? It’s that good.

Sara Mesa is a young writer from Spain. I mean, she’s my age but for a writer that’s considered young. The 40+ female authors in Spain are all pretty horrible. I keep writing about them because I don’t have a choice but they are quite bad. The younger generation, though, kicks ass. Last year, I discovered the Basque Aixa de la Cruz who’s good, and now Sara Mesa who’s actually great.

The novel is very fresh and unforced. It’s not like anything I’ve read before, and that’s unusual because I’ve read everything.

I’m thinking it’s unavoidable that I’ll write about it.