Author: Clarissa

Stepping up to the Plate

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Klara’s summer camp teacher says she has to come to the game because she’s their star batter (I hope it’s the right spelling because I’m clueless), and the team will lose without her.

I have somehow produced a mega sociable, monolingual baseball player. Tears of joy are choking me.

I was literally certain until yesterday that “homerun” was from American football.

She even has a “stepping up to the plate is…” with her own special song.

My husband and I grew up in the USSR, and it’s 100% guaranteed that nobody ever stepped up to the plate in our genealogical tree.

I’m With the Stoner

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

I’m on the side of the stoner dude. He won’t let himself be guilt-tripped by the standard slogans, which means he’s already mostly on our side:

What Should I Have Done Differently?

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

What exactly did I do wrong that I never have any chance to talk about literature with anyone?

Everything else worked out in my life, including the stuff that seemed fantastical when I first decided upon it. But I didn’t manage to arrange things so that I could talk about literature. With people, I mean.

I’m a professor of literature. I spend most of my day reading literature in several languages, thinking about it, writing about it – but I don’t have interlocutors.

I’ve been participating in an online book club, and every meeting shows me how invigorating and precious I find an opportunity to talk about literature. It’s online, though, so not quite real.

What should I have done differently?

Seeing Color

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

I already shared this old Soviet joke but the previous post makes it newly relevant.

An American spy trained for five grueling years to be deployed with a covert mission to the USSR. He learned the language to perfection, studied how people dress, walk, move. Finally, he’s ready for the mission. He crosses into the USSR and finds his way to a tiny Ukrainian village. An old grandma is walking along the street.

“Good morning, babcia,” addresses her the spy in perfect Ukrainian.

“Good morning to you, too, American spy,” says the babcia.

“But how? How did you know I was an American spy??” asks the stunned American spy.

“Because you are a Negro, son,” explains the babcia.

We Are Much Paler

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Is this a bloody parody, or something?

I don’t know where that is but it’s clearly very much to the South from Ukraine.

Ukrainians are much paler, women don’t wear burqas, and men are either at the front or rescuing victims instead of running around in droves like weirdo bunnies.

Neither the architecture nor the climate track either. Also, people have cars. And coffee makers, laptops, and all other attributes of civilization. Kharkiv is a large European city, with coffee shops, restaurants, cathedrals, universities.

It’s like when I first started working here at my current university, and department Chair asked me to wear “whatever you normally wear in Ukraine for our cultural event.” I said I was wearing exactly that. “But it looks like normal clothes,” the Chair observed.

Repositories of Meaning

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

In one of the novels I analyze for my book, a mega wealthy movie director burns down the house of one of his workers in order to film the man’s devastated face when he discovers the incinerated house. The rich filmmaker believes that since he compensated the loss of the house with a cash gift, it’s all good. That the fire destroyed the family heirlooms, the photo albums, and the beloved knick-knacks of the worker’s family is of no interest to him. The worker can now buy a new house and all the new stuff, so what’s the problem?

The movie director is, of course, very left-wing.

I always think of this scene when I read the endless chatter regarding how the looting and the destruction during leftist riots is not a big deal because “insurance pays for it.”

The entire mentality of (neo)liberalism is here on full view. Everything is replaceable, and a new, shiny version is always better than the old one. The idea that objects are repositories of meaning and people are repositories of culture is alien to them.

The novel is Salvar el fuego by Guillermo Arriaga. I can’t recommend it highly enough. And yes, it’s five trillion pages long but each page is a linguistic delight.

Aging Bimbo

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

She’s not an asset. She’s a low-IQ aging bimbo who’s getting overheated unnecessarily.  Unfortunately, there are many of them around. This happens to childless post-menopausal women a lot. Not always, mind you, but it’s a definite and real danger.

She used to be quite normal but human biology is relentless and unkind.

Is Hitler Enough?

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Over the weekend, I translated a text from the drug trials of a new medication for bladder cancer. One of the test animals died as a result of the trial. The rest survived and the overwhelming majority showed notable improvement. The trial will now proceed to human subjects.

The entire drug wasn’t ditched because it caused one spotted pig to die. The potential benefits of the medication outweighed that one case.

Similarly, I don’t think that we need to ditch the entire nation-state model because in one case it led to Hitler. In all the other cases, it didn’t. To the contrary, it led to many wonderful things we all enjoy. This worldwide trial demonstrated that nation-states don’t inevitably lead to Hitler. Moreover, alternative systems also sometimes lead in the direction of Hitler. The only conclusion I can draw is that we shouldn’t get rid of the nation-state on the off chance it might produce Hitler.

Close Borders Out of Kindness

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

People are not perfectly rational machines that calculate risk-reward benefits before doing something. People are emotional, persuadable, tribal, and often extremely self-sabotaging.

Many migrants from Mexico and Central America don’t want to be here in the sense of being deeply attached to the need to be Americans. People cross into the US because of family pressure, peer pressure, a desire to avoid legal problems in the home country, because they don’t want to feel like losers, because of “look at María’s son, he crossed and is now sending money for grandma’s medication”, because of large houses built with the money of the neighbors who crossed over, because of “everybody else is doing it”, because of “hey, at least it’s an adventure”, and so on.

By removing the temptation of the open border, we are doing those countries a big favor. We are undermining their oligarchies that have gotten extremely rich by exporting large percentages of their populations. We are leaving people in peace to figure out their lives in their own countries. The only kind thing to do is to end this travesty where we drag millions across the border, leaving their countries in abject misery.

If Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum is deprived of remittance money, she’ll have to figure out how to keep the economy functional. She’ll be motivated actually to do something for the Mexican people. That’s a good thing. Once we close the border to people and money, she’ll have to show up, and Mexico will become a great country it deserves to be.

Money for Newborns

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

This is actually a good idea:

It’s not a measure to stimulate the hyper-irresponsible to procreate. To the contrary, it helps people who will be responsible, intelligent parents capable of long-term thinking. The kind of people we want to have children.

Whoever came up with it is smart.