Second day of the snowstorm. I have reorganized my entire home library. Then I reorganized my notebook collection. Then I reorganized my recipe book collection. Klara is riding her bicycle around the house, strumming a balalaika and signing “The Lord Is Good to Me” as she rides.

It continues to snow.

My university is forbidding the professors who teach in person to move their classes online during snow days. When campus is closed because of weather conditions, we do what we always did and cancel class. Online is not an alternative to in-person. Nothing is an alternative to in-person. Looking at food on a screen isn’t eating. Making kissy noises at a screen isn’t kissing. It brings me to tears that there are at least a few people on campus who get this.

It’s very revealing that during the pandemic professors have done absolutely everything to destroy higher education while administrators have fought them at every step to prevent it. If professors were allowed to do what they want, every university would end up being an online diploma mill with pre-recorded “content” and underpaid people in India grading the essays students bought online from other underpaid people in India.

An enormous success of vaccination and boosterization in Israel! COVID deaths are at an all time high.

It must be the fault of the unvaccinated that deaths are higher than when zero people were vaccinated. Or something. I’m sure there’s an explanation.

If anybody wondered why gushy stories about Israel have evaporated from the press, this is why. Give it a few more cycles and maybe we’ll be allowed to notice that these “vaccines” do the opposite of what they are supposed to.

Our political sciences department is going to hold a roundtable on Ukraine under an unofficial name “it’s not about the NATO, stupid.” Because the idea that Russia has been invading Ukraine (for over 300 years, no less) because of the NATO is bizarrely idiotic.

It’s absolutely impossible to persuade Americans that anything on this planet isn’t about them, though, so it’s a lost cause.

Who the ef names a flash drive brand “bosexy”? Who’s the target customer? Cam girl prostitutes?

I need flash drives for work but imagine whipping out something called bosexy in the classroom or at a conference. I don’t care if nobody sees it. I’ll feel weird.

A propos of nothing, here’s a picture of me celebrating that today is a snow day.

And here’s evidence of the snow day:

This deck is a disaster but we are getting a new one built next month. Of course, it will now cost a lot more because of the inflation but what are you going to do.

We had a non-academic speaker at work yesterday and at some point she mentioned the inflation, got scared and asked, in a loud whisper if it’s OK to mention the inflation.

Rafael Chirbes died in 2015. I believe that he’s the best Spanish writer of the twenty-first century so far, so this was a heavy loss. I remember exactly where I was when I found that he died, and it still makes me cry.

Chirbes died at the cusp of his artistic career. A lifelong four-packs-a-day smoker and a heavy drinker who started suffering from a host of severe illnesses by the age of 35, it’s a wonder he lived as long as he did.

And then a few months ago, it turned out that 3 of Chirbes’s best books were never published. He was preparing them for publication when he died. The books are his diaries that he wrote for several decades.

The first volume came out last year. It contains the diaries covering the 1980s, 1990s, and up to 2005. The publication of the diaries was the literary sensation of 2021 in Spain. Of course, it isn’t just the descriptions of a writer’s inner life that people are lining up to buy. There are many very graphic descriptions of gay sex. (At this point, several people stopped reading this post and beelined it to Amazon to buy the book). And since Chirbes was a voracious reader, he read all of the bestsellers and wrote down honest (and often very cruel) opinions about them. So now everybody can gossip about what Chirbes said about this or that famous writer.

None of these things are what makes the book great, though. It’s the extremely fresh format Chirbes came up with that makes Diarios 1-2 irresistible. The diaries are like an autobiography without the one thing that makes autobiographies suck, which is an organizing idea. Usually, an author tries to make the story of his life coherent by finding (or inventing) one common thread and arranging events on it like beads on a necklace. Everything progresses towards a single, very obvious goal, and that’s very boring.

But Chirbes’s Diarios 1-2 have none of that. Things just happen, life occurs, and it’s messy, painful, ugly, beautiful, confusing, everything. There’s obviously an enormous amount of work behind the seeming effortlessness of the diaries. And a shit ton of editing.

There are two more volumes still to be published. They should cover the time when Chirbes finally became really famous. I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to discover that he keeps publishing new books years after his death. Imagine you are a Shakespearean scholar, and suddenly three new plays are uncovered – and they are his best.

OK, I’ll stop ranting for the moment. But it will be a short moment.

Finally, it’s not extremely embarrassing to be a Canadian any more. So that’s good.

I’m really in love with Joe Massey’s photography, especially the industrial section.

In case anybody is looking for a gift, khm khm, you can’t go wrong with one of these prints. Or two. Or. . . OK, I’ll stop now.

I’m really crazy about these pictures.

I don’t get Boris Johnson. I was a huge supporter when he won the election. Then he completely faded and became a more timid British Trudeau during COVID.

Now all of a sudden he woke up, retired much of the COVID lunacy, is doing great work on Ukraine. I’m glad, obviously, but this all feels very bipolar.

When I go on Facebook, it’s a sign of desperation because my article isn’t working out. I literally have two more sentences to write before I’ll send it back, and I’ve been on them for days with no results.

So I’m listlessly scrolling through FB. Maybe I should go do today’s Wordle.

P.S. Solved Wordle very fast. Back to Facebook.