I never read anything by Italian novelists, which is why I decided to try Private Life (La vita intima in the original) by Niccolò Ammaniti. It’s a good novel which would make an even better movie.
The main character is Maria Cristina, the wife of the Prime Minister of Italy and “the most beautiful woman in the world” according to social media. She is an inoffensive but extremely vapid creature who wants nothing in life but to wear cute outfits and exist in a state of bovine contentment. But people keep expecting that she do more. Her small daughter needs attention and care, her husband needs her to be a wife and not a flower pot, her only friend wants Maria Cristina to notice that he’s a human being and not a household appliance, and the press expects her to answer at least a couple of questions every few years. All these demands confuse the one-dimensional, stupid Maria Cristina.
Incapable of feeling anything beyond physical pain from stubbing her toe and desperate to spur on her atrophied sensibilities, Maria Cristina engages in a sadomasochistic game with an old acquaintance she thinks is blackmailing her. Or courting her. Or both. The weird tricks these very rich, bored people play on each other in-between virtue-signaling by way of their globalist opinions are tawdry and pathetic. The political and financial elites of Italy are depicted in Private Life as not so much wicked as vacuous and primitive. It’s impossible to despise or even dislike Maria Cristina like one can’t despise a cat or a guppy fish. If she were a tad more evolved, I’d call her immoral but to break moral laws, you need to understand them, and Maria Cristina is clearly not equipped for that.
It’s a good novel, and I’m glad that Italian literature is alive and well. If Niccolò Ammaniti is any indication, Italians really despise their elites but, hey, can anybody blame them?
When I supported Trump’s child tax credit, Dem readers unloaded on me like I was saying something downright evil. I hope they stay true to their principles and criticize Harris for this idea. I’m true to mine, so I’m in favor.
I fail to see the connection with childcare costs because the main driver of costs – as people who actually used daycare know – is the paucity of childcare facilities. Even the most exorbitantly priced daycares have a waiting list from here into the eternity. I’m still supportive of the child tax credit but this is a problem it won’t solve.
What I do despise is the dig at Vance’s regional origins by the use of “memaw and papaw.” It’s childish and off-putting. In theory, the idea of grandparents helping out is fine but if people are using daycare instead it’s because this option is not available. There’s literally not a single person in existence who isn’t using it because nobody suggested this possibility.
In short, everybody in the political space is being an infantile dick on this subject.
Expanding the child tax credit is still a great idea, no matter who proposes it. It’s a million times better than direct payments to parents.
There is a pro-Palestinian session at the conference of my professional association of literary critics. I’m for freedom of speech, so I support. I’m not going to attend because the titles of the talks sound preachy, and life is too short but I support people speaking about whatever they choose. In any case, what I wanted to mention is that there are no sessions that positively highlight the Israeli or the Jewish culture. The number of Jews in academia is extraordinary. But they aren’t organizing sessions or making their case.
Lots of people complain and moan but have they put in the work to change things? Like people who say they don’t have time to write but they’ve made zero effort to make time.
This isn’t a post about Israel, in case people don’t understand.
And as a bonus to those who have read to the end, I learned a new word today as a result of reading the program of the conference:
translanguaging
I have no idea what it means and zero interest in finding out.
Literary critics, eh? Such love for the language. Such clarity of expression.
Somebody left an interesting comment on my Ukrainian YouTube show:
Russian Christianity never relinquished paganism. We can see that, for instance, in the holy icons with the portrait of Stalin, which is absolute blasphemy to any regular Orthodox Christian. The love of totalitarianism is also in that vein because it comes from a need to deify an earthly mortal.
I now reserve a room at the library to write. What with teaching 4 courses with the cumulative number of 92 students (and no teaching assistants, you understand) and chairing the department, opportunities abound to weasel out of writing. If ever there were an excuse not to write, I’m in full possession of it. One of the courses I’m teaching, I didn’t know I was teaching it until a week before classes began. A content-heavy course (meaning, not language), and it’s not in my area at all. I’ve got to prepare. Plus, I need to grade. And the GAs don’t supervise themselves, do they? Budgets don’t miraculously materialize on my desktop. I got to do all of that. Ten languages that I’ve got to manage.
So I found a great way to defeat the opportunity to weasel out. I go to the library and sit in a room alone, three hours twice a week. I write in-between, too, but these writing-only sessions are great.
This is a regular reminder that no US politician was nicer to Putin than Obama. (George W Bush runs a close second). Obama worked for years to disarm Ukraine before the 2014 invasion, forcing Ukrainians to give up large stocks of weapons precisely in the areas that Putin would claim. (Yes, Ukrainians were mega stupid to agree. But cheating stupid people and getting them killed is still not OK. There’s no defense in law based on the “yes, I murdered him but he deserved it because he was too trusting and dumb.”)
As a Senator for Illinois, Obama personally supervised the disarming of the region that borders – guess whom? – Russia.
In Donetsk, I stood among piles of conventional weapons that were slowly being dismantled,” Barack Obama, then a newly elected United States senator from Illinois, said in 2005 after his first foreign trip.
The future president visited the eastern Ukrainian city, the future hotbed of pro-Russian separatism, and helped secure $48m to fund the further destruction of 400,000 small arms, 1,000 portable anti-aircraft missiles and 15,000 tonnes of ammunition.
Here is photographic evidence:
Donetsk, eh? Donetsk has been under Russian control since 2014 as a result. As a resident of Illinois, I find it hard to understand why the senator of our state – and then the president of our country – would be so dedicated to disarming Ukraine. He probably thought Illinois had no bigger problems than Ukraine’s capacity to defend Donetsk.
Obama actually helped invest US money, our taxpayer money into disarming Ukraine. This doesn’t seem to bother anybody besides me, so I keep bringing it up because I can’t get over the absolute insanity of the US politics where we pay first to disarm and then to arm Ukraine, and this all happens within the same short period of time.
No photograph of this kind exists featuring Trump, by the way. To the contrary, Trump was the first US politician to start re-arming Ukraine in 2016.
Obama made it clear recently that Harris is going to continue whatever he started. More photographic evidence from Obama himself:
Now, attention, an important question: why would Putin not want Harris as president? Again, we have incontrovertible proof brought us yesterday by the Biden DOJ that delivered evidence of Russia funding Lauren Chen’s anti-Trump rhetoric.
Why, in the face of all this, aren’t we discussing whether Obama was a Russian asset? Not a spy, obviously, but definitely an asset. How else can we possibly describe all this? Russia annexed the Crimea and invaded the Donbass during the Obama presidency. The massacre of Ilovaisk where Putin blatantly defied the agreements with the US happened in 2014. There were no consequences to Putin over that. There was no Crimea, Donetsk, Ilovaisk or Lugansk during the Trump administration. I’d be the first person to wail to the skies if there were. What did Trump ever do for Russia that’s remotely approaching all this?
I criticize Trump all the time. I think everybody is tired already of my litany of complaints about Trump but I can repeat it if necessary. But on this issue, which obviously matters to me enormously, I just can’t see how Trump was worse for Ukraine than Obama.
To conclude, here’s the story of the Ukrainian photographer who took the famous picture of Obama at the weapons depot in Donetsk:
A local photographer named Sergey Vaganov took pictures of Obama in the arms depots.
A decade later, Vaganov fled a Russian-backed separatist conflict in Donetsk and, in March, barely survived the Russian siege of Mariupol.
“I was waiting for the relief [of death]. I had these half-suicidal thoughts,” Vaganov told Al Jazeera, describing how he and his wife, Iryna, waited out Russian air raids in their ice-cold apartment with windows shattered by shelling.
The siege of Mariupol took place in 2022, during the Biden presidency. Please, tell me some more about how it’s Trump Ukrainians should fear.
Kamala Harris single-handedly disproved the entire theory of intellectual heritability.
Yes, yes, I know it’s more complicated than “smart parents invariably produce smart children.” A stupid great-great-grandma can rear her empty head at any point.
N is exactly like this. He has a lightning-quick sense of humor, always delivering the perfect comeback instantly. I always envied this because I’m a slow, plodding thinker, and the art of the funny comeback is not in my arsenal.
N talks to no people outside of our immediate family, and this wealth of ready wit is concealed from humanity.
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