The Chimney-Sweeper’s Boy that Ruth Rendell published as Barbara Vine came out in 1998. I don’t believe since then anybody has written in such a nuanced and profound way about surrogacy, even though it’s obviously not called that in the novel.

The man in The Chimney-Sweeper’s Boy doesn’t push his children’s mother physically out of their lives. She lives with them and nobody doubts her rights as a mother. But he pushes her out emotionally. And even though he adores the kids and is the absolute best father anybody can imagine, the daughters grow up to become profoundly damaged, miserable women. It’s both parents together and the love between them that creates happy, healthy children. Surrogacy, even in the mild form described in the novel, is poisonous. The girls’ mother is pushed aside as unimportant and annoying. As a result, one of the daughters becomes a perpetual child, unable to grow into a woman, while the other finds joy in letting a man degrade her sexually.

The novel offers some hope in that at least the daughters know their mother and start repairing their relationship after the overbearing father dies.

It’s a very good novel.

All day today I’ve been responding to Facebook messages, emails and phone calls about my father. I don’t know why it had to happen today and not be spread out across a week, for example.

Not surprisingly, I’m rereading Ruth Rendell’s novel The Chimney-Sweeper’s Boy that is about a larger-than-life father who adored his two daughters. He dies at the age of 71 at the beginning of the novel and they grieve him and start discovering unexpected facts about his life. It’s one of Rendell’s best novels. I have already read it 3 times, so this is my fourth go. This is a novel of incredible psychological insight. I highly recommend.

I’m obsessively, terribly scared of tsunamis. Which is quite funny given that I live deep inland. I should be terrified of tornadoes because I live in tornado-land. And I do fear them but not in an overwhelming, crazy way like tsunamis. I never lived anywhere that has tsunamis, so it’s not a fear based on experience. Psychologically, it’s my fear of being swept away and overwhelmed by a personality much stronger than mine.

And by the way, I feel nauseous with fear even writing this post.

What’s the natural disaster (if any) that terrifies you more than any other? I promise not to offer any psychological explanations because I only have my own and I paid a lot of money for it.

I don’t have the energy to read much new stuff, so I’m rereading my mystery collections. I have gone through all of my John Lescroarts and have started on my Ruth Rendells. I have 27 of her titles, which should last me a couple of months. She was a brilliant author and a kind, wonderful person. Many years ago, when it was impossible to find books in English back in Ukraine, she sent me a box of her books with a long handwritten letter, and I’ll never forget how much it meant.

On 23 October 1940, the Holland House library in London was bombed in an air raid. This is an iconic photo of readers still looking ar books even when the library is in ruins:

It’s impossible to accept that this exact thing (minus the old-fashioned hats) is happening at this very moment in Europe again. Done by the same people again but this time not through a proxy but directly.

(Stalin engineered Hitler’s rise to power in order to partition Europe and have Hitler weaken its Western part in preparation for the big war Stalin was planning).

Ukrainian Wordle decided to be lazy today and used the same word as the NYTimes Wordle. I feel cheated.

What have you changed your mind about in the past year? This is an exercise I regularly propose to help us discover whether we have become too rigid in our thinking.

I’ve changed my mind on a bunch of things recently.

1. Translation. Throughout the spring semester, I kept telling my translation students that I’m never going to work as a paid translator again. It was done, it was all in the past, I had moved on. And now I’m translating for money again, enjoying it massively, and planning to continue.

2. I was completely sure Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine until the actual moment of the invasion. I tend to hyper-intellectualize everything and forget about the power of emotions. An invasion would be so irrational and stupid that I thought Russians would never do it. But as always, my belief in the power of rationality played a bad joke on me. Many people were in the same situation but instead of accepting that we were completely wrong, they have tried to evade an encounter with reality and kept arguing that the war wasn’t happening.

3. I was sure that I’d never vote D again because I’d never get over the lockdowns and the riots. I’m still not over the lockdowns and the riots but if Republicans don’t run any candidates with John McCain’s lucidity on Russia, I’ll have to cover my nose from the bad stench and go with the Ds. Although I’m hoping I wouldn’t have to.

These are the three big ones this year so far. What are yours?

Russians are delivering most of the strikes from their own territory. Even when Ukraine retakes all of the occupied territories, there’s absolutely nothing to prevent Russia from making sporadic strikes on Ukrainian shopping malls, hospitals, or residential areas pretty much forever. Or for as long as Russia exists.

Can anybody suggest any solution to this problem that isn’t disbanding the Russian Federation? It’s not a rhetorical question. I sincerely see no other solution.

Our new top administrator is proving to be exactly as neoliberal as he was during the job interview. You have to give it to the guy, he’s honest. Never misrepresented himself, never pretended to be less neoliberal than he is. But now everybody is upset. “He’s saying there will be a hiring freeze and personnel cuts! How could he?” He can because he told us he would and we hired him. So he’s doing exactly what brought him the job. “He’s pretending that our sister university doesn’t exist!” Yes, just like he did during the job interview where he didn’t mention the sister university a single time.

We had 4 candidates. We chose the most neoliberal one. A large hiring committee filled with the same faculty members who are now complaining chose him. So whom should we now blame? It’s definitely not the candidate, in my opinion.

Seeing the photos of Setenil de las Bodegas in Spain makes me acutely aware of how much stronger some people’s nervous system is than mine. I can’t see the picture without freaking out, let alone want to be there.