What I’m really looking forward to is the emergence of a genre targeted at people between the ages of 19 years 2 months and 11 days and 20 years 3 months and 2 days. I don’t know how we did without it until now.

Many people have completely bought into the ridiculous myth that Trump voters are obsessed fans who carry Trump’s photo in their wallets. While there are always die-hard fans (hell, I know somebody who has a photo of Bill Clinton as her desktop wallpaper), most people are completely normal and not in the least obsessed. The cult of Trump is like the cult of Hillary both in size and in its utter irrelevance.

One thing that I learned at yesterday’s conference was that there’s a new promising writer in Spain who’s Ukrainian. Her name is Margaryta Yakovenko (the “y” in the first name is the Ukrainian spelling, which gives me warm and fuzzies). This whole time I’ve been wondering where the young Ukrainian writers were and now I know that they are in Spain.

I haven’t read her novel yet but I’ll tell you all about it when I do. I made a three-page list of the books I urgently need to read at that conference. It’s glorious.

The best moment was when we started sharing reading recommendations and I said, “I know we are talking about Spain but I absolutely have to mention this amazing Mexican writer whose name is Fernanda Melchor.” As I said it, the scholar who invited me to the session lifted up Fernanda Melchor’s book and held it in front of the screen. He loves the author so much that he always has her book on hand! It’s an incredible feeling when you meet somebody who has the exact literary tastes as you do.

The funniest thing about the racist psychiatrist at Yale who fantasizes about murdering white people is that she’s white. Everywhere else on the planet she’s undoubtedly white. It’s only in the US that it’s considered cute for somebody very well-off and fortunate like her to play blackface.

My session went 90 minutes over the allotted time. I’m over the moon, folks. My faith in the future of academia is beginning to get restored. Although it’s not likely to happen in North America.

I was invited to this session in the capacity of what in my country we call “a wedding general.” In the nineteenth century, retired generals supplemented their income by making paid appearances at weddings. A general would sit at the top of the table in his uniform and regalia, boosting the prestige of the family and making the guests think that he’s related to the bride or the groom. In a similar way, the speakers of the session asked me to sit there and puff up my cheeks (which was the main job requirement for the original wedding general) and look important.

It turned out to be a great session. These are young (meaning about 10 years younger than me) Spanish academics. They are very done with wokeness, identity sloganeering, pileups on imaginary fascists, globalization, and the digital oligarchy. They want to read Zygmunt Bauman and teach Great Books. In the 3 hours that the session + additional discussion lasted, the only person who mentioned “inclusion” was me and that was only to mock it.

The best part was that we had a completely normal, completely unconstrained discussion about literature. There was complete freedom to say whatever one wanted. No woke comissars, no obligatory disawovals of “systemic injustices.” We spoke like normal people. And I think the audience liked it because many of the listeners stayed on debating all through the lunch hour, even though academics aren’t normally open to the disruptions in their food intake.

I’m so happy I could cry.

Everything has been back to normal around here for months except for kid-related stuff. Toddlers still need to wear masks in daycare. Indoor children’s activities are still closed.

And most ridiculously of all, the outdoor splash pad still gets sanitized every 90 minutes for a whole half hour. It’s outside! There’s water everywhere! The sun is shining! The attendees are all kids and their non-ancient parents.

It bugs me beyond all measure when clearly stupid things like these are done. There is zero risk of COVID on that splash pad. Why are we doing this?

People are fearful of depopulation strategies being baked into COVID mitigation and you can see why. Parents of small children have been really mistreated for absolutely no reason during this pandemic. A lot more effort is being put into “protecting” 5-year-olds from the COVID that they neither get nor transmit than the frail elderly who do die of it. One’s experience of the pandemic is dramatically worse if one has small kids. This whole thing has been one long, undeserved punishment for parents. Is it so surprising that people are noticing and looking for an explanation?

I thought that once you got promoted to Full Professor (which I have been) there were no promotions beyond that. But that’s not true! In 5 years, I’ll become eligible for promotion to the rank of Distinguished Research Professor. The title comes accompanied by a salary increase, a semester to do research, and a medal. In five years, I’ll wrap up my second term as chair and go for this new promotion. By that time, I’ll have two more books and 15 more articles.

Things are looking up.

Completely outside of the abortion debate – in which I no longer participate due to my age – this child’s parents have done a piss-poor job.

They have led her to believe that getting pregnant at 18 is an absolute end of the world. That isn’t choice. That’s the exact opposite of choice.

Any parent who has an ounce of love for their daughter would give her a real choice. They would say, “whenever you decide to give birth, I will be there for you, I will help, we’ll figure it out.”

Again, this isn’t about abortion rights, especially since you can get abortion pills through telemedicine at any time in any place. It’s about shitty parents who need their daughter to engage in this kind of performance to reassure them she won’t foist a grandkid on them.

If this were my child who felt the need to do this performance, I’d do a lot of soul-searching about what I’ve taught her about being a woman and what nefarious purpose I was pursuing by making it so dark.

In the two days of the conference we have had so far, I have already heard 5 times the extraordinarily stupid idea that the concept of hurry was invented by capitalism to make people work harder, faster, and squeeze every ounce of productivity from them. Apparently, some critic said it, and now everybody has to repeat this piece of arrant idiocy.

Here is why this idea is painfully stupid.

In the USSR, the concept of rushed productivity was elevated to the level of religious worship. The Stakhanovite movement was created. Stakhanov was a coal miner who somehow managed to mine over a 100 tons of coal in 6 hours. This was 14 (yes, fourteen) times his assigned daily quota. Immediately, every worker in the USSR had to imitate Stakhanov. People lost their limbs and suffered other terrible injuries trying to work as fast as Stakhanov. Everybody was forced to make a pledge to set their own Stakhanovite record. And this was Stalinism, so by “forced” I mean people were really terrified not to break these ridiculous records.

Of course, Stakhanov’s achievement was fake. The Soviet authorities faked it on purpose. On the one hand, the myth of Stakhanov helped drive workers beyond their breaking point, forcing them to work extraordinarily fast and assist in their own exploitation. On the other hand, the Stakhanovite phenomenon was very useful for the purges. The equipment broke, people suffered injuries, and the authorities explained it by suggesting that the engineers and the highly qualified mechanics who serviced the equipment were Japanese or American spies. This made it easy to whip up a frenzy of hatred for the “evil engineers” and have them executed. This has all been massively studied, so there’s really no excuse for people who want to do scholarship to chirp like dumb sparrows about these things.

The USSR was created in agrarian, semi-feudal countries that had never industrialized and who were about 150 years behind Great Britain and the US in terms of creating a capitalist system. The USSR was a socialist country. This means that referring to rushed labor as particularly capitalist is like criticizing Uruguayans for only having one head. Everybody has only one head but it does sound eerie when you single out Uruguayans as particularly weird in their one-headedness.

As academics, we get paid to read, educate ourselves, and then share knowledge with others. Instead, we often memorize a bunch of idiotic slogans and spend the rest of our lives repeating them like stupid parrots. Then we come to the classroom and deliver these half-baked, shallow pseudo-insights to the young people who pay us to be duped like this. For shame!

OK, rant over. I will now be able to express this idea at the conference without using the word “stupid” in every sentence. I honestly don’t know what I would do without this blog. I get very worked up about this kind of thing and I need to let off steam before I start jumping at people’s throats. Thank you, everybody, for putting up with my periodic rants.

For our fourteenth anniversary, I took N to a British tearoom for a traditional afternoon tea experience.

Finally, I understood why people eat scones. I always hated scones but these ones were freshly made with rosewater and served with real clotted cream and homemade strawberry jam. And there were cucumber sandwiches!

It’s very expensive but N is worth it.

This is the pre-anniversary celebration. The real anniversary is on Sunday and we’ll be celebrating at a mysterious location where N is taking me.