Oh, I would wear it. I would so wear it. I would wear the living daylights out of it at work. Maybe then people would leave me the bloody fuck alone for a bit.
Author: Clarissa
Life Inside a Soviet Joke
I am so serious about my plan to recover from burnout that for the first time in my life – the first time! In my life! – I placed one of those “I will be on vacation until March 16 and will answer your message after that” on my email.
This came after a day-long email exchange with a colleague that reminded me of a Soviet joke about a very full tram in Odessa.
“Comrade, are you getting off on the next stop?”
“Yes, I am.”
“How about the people in front of you? Are they getting off?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? Did you ask them?”
“Yes, I asked them.”
“And what did they say?”
Turns out it’s a lot less charming when it happens to you in real life.
Good Students
Today a student told me that she decided not to become a teacher because schools get small children addicted to screens, and this is child abuse in which she refuses to participate.
I was so happy I almost cried.
Once again I want to repeat that today’s students are enormously easier to teach than the students from 15 years ago. They are more alive, they express interesting opinions, they are more self-assured, they laugh at my jokes. COVID, obviously. So at least that’s a good result from the collective lunacy that was COVID.
Magical Potatoes
There’s this really funny story about when Yeltsin was losing desperately to the Communists in 1995, and he decided to campaign on the idea that he was a man of the people. At a campaign stop in a small town, voters complained that they had to subsist on homegrown vegetables because they couldn’t afford to buy food.
“My family loves homegrown vegetables!” Yeltsin piped up happily. “Every spring we plant 8 sacks of potatoes. And then in the Fall we harvest 8 sacks of potatoes.”
In the end, he had to falsify the election to prevent the Communists from winning.
Book Notes: Lucía en la noche by Juan Manuel de Prada
I have no idea how Prada manages to be such a scandalous right-winger everywhere he goes and end up writing utterly apolitical novels like Lucía en la noche, or all the rest of them that I’ve read. The two most recent ones I haven’t read because they are about WW2 and I hate WW2 literature. So maybe those are political, I don’t know.
The only thing in Lucía that can be vaguely seen as political is the storyline about a corrupt NGO that abuses refugees in a Syrian refugee camp. Which is a stance that everybody across the political spectrum will support because there’s no pro-abuse of refugees party on the left or the right.
I liked the novel until the Syrian refugees made a showing. My dislike of this storyline isn’t content-based. I didn’t like it because it’s clumsily done and feels like something completely extraneous to the novel. Prada needed to tie the loose ends and he came up with this narrative device that is not elegant and does not add to the enjoyment of the novel. You can absolutely write about Syrian refugees in a way that will improve a novel. Prada, however, didn’t manage that. He decided to wrap things up, had no idea how to do it, and tacked a spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold ending to a novel about a writer’s struggle to regain his creative impetus. Some people should write about refugees but Prada is not one of them. He should write about writers. Those are his best novels by far.
Don’t Be a Nuisance
We, Orthodox Christians, somehow manage to celebrate Pascha (which does not coincide with the Catholic and Protestant Easter) without making a nuisance out of ourselves. Our priests remind us every year that making an issue of our fast to others is a sin. If the choice is between eating what you shouldn’t and rubbing your fasting virtue into other people’s faces, the choice should always be to accept the food quietly and not make yourself the center of attention. The moment when the fast becomes a way to lord it over others, we have betrayed the whole point of the fast as mandated by the Lord.
Yes, we are only 1% of the population. But Muslims are only 5% of the population in Spain. These are comparable numbers. You can be a minority without being a dick.
Geriatric Retelling
This reminds me of that hilarious Russian ecranisation of Anna Karenina where the director wanted to cast his menopausal wife as Anna, and the entire cast was, of necessity, geriatric.
Love Denzel but a 71-year-old Hannibal is just as ridiculous.
Who watches this kind of stuff, I wonder?
Quote: The Grace of Living
We all come to this vale of tears with some modest mission that does not usually coincide with the boastful and high-sounding missions that, in our conceit, we attribute to ourselves; and in fulfilling that modest mission that has been assigned to us lies the grace of living.
Juan Manuel de Prada, Weirdos Like Me (2023)
I want to add that figuring out and accepting this mission is a crucial task of existence. Sad as sad can be is the life of people who reject the mission apportioned to them by God.
A Good Communist
A joke from Ukraine:
Today is the 73rd anniversary of the day when Stalin finally became a good Communist.
Because he croaked on this day, in case you don’t know.
Love the Language
One little quote from Prada in Spanish so that those who know and love the language understand why I’m into Prada in spite of his extremely unfortunate geopolitical stances:
Pero Hello no creía en el éxito, sino tan sólo en la gloria, que no la dan los hombres; y aguardó esa gloria poniéndose a escribir todos los días, en un pequeño pabellón o belvedere, con las cristaleras abiertas hacia el mar y el sol naciente inflamando su escritura de un estilo ardoroso que, aun tomado en pequeñas dosis, abrasa las resistencias del incrédulo y descompone a los tibios y a los eunucoides.
I love it how he goes up and up in this very elevated style and, right at the moment when it reaches the level of utter pomposity, the writer collapses it all into comedy with the word eunucoides that is extremely funny and not very translatable.
Shoot it straight into my veins because this is the shit I live for.
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