Author: Clarissa

Remember 1986

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

Hmm, I wonder who was president in 1986 and which party he represented. What a curious mystery.

I see absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this won’t happen with Trump in the WH. He was, after all, the person who brought us the Platinum Plan that put criminals in the streets to restore racial justice and proposed to make lynching a federal hate crime. As we know, Kamala Harris is proud that this plan was finally completed by the Biden administration. Why exactly I’m supposed to believe that Trump’s second term would be dramatically different from his first nobody ever even tried to explain.

I’m not voting for Kamala either because I don’t like these policies no matter who they come from.

Bathroom Drama

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I’m probably doing something wrong because the quotes I’m getting on the bathroom update are very insane. Surely, one bathroom, furnished with the cheapest options of all available, can’t cost 1/4 of the entire house? What do people normally do because those who have an odd $100,000 lying around to spend on one bathroom have already bought their brand-new mansions and aren’t needing to do any remodel.

The sales rep was downright contemptuous when I said their prices were too much for me.

We make a very good living. Truly can’t complain. But it’s still not enough to tear out an old shower and tub. Who has enough, then, is what I wonder.

The Cat Hoax

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Cat, shmat. We had months of riots, two dozen people dead including children, buildings burned, businesses trashed, David Dorn bleeding out on the floor, Secoriea Turner murdered because people were told on TV that unarmed black men are genocided by police by the thousand. Yes, the cat story is stupid but since we’ve all collectively agreed that it’s fine to spread racist hoaxes, what do we expect? We have a woman running for president who actively spread both the Jussie Smollett and the BLM hoaxes. And nobody cares. Expecting the uneaten cat to be beyond the pale all of a sudden makes no sense.

Less Pitching

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Every home remodel company that comes out has an identical pitch. Identical, folks. There’s a video you just absolutely must watch that says the exact same things. There’s a heartfelt inquiry of, “Do you believe the values of our company are something you can support by becoming our customer?” There’s an identical (and identically fake) printout from some website informing you that the standard price to install a new shower and tub is $105,048.

I don’t blame the salespeople. They are forced to deliver this unnecessarily long pitch aimed at absolute morons. I blame whoever came up with this sales strategy and seeded the business world with it.

My question is, though, where’s the alignment between the type of customer that can afford these products and the supposed IQ of the addressees of this pitch? Bluntly put, this sales strategy can only work on very intellectually modest people. And such people will never make enough money to buy these mega expensive toilets.

At this point, I’d seriously pay a surcharge to whatever sales dude who’d talk to me like a normal person and not a clinical idiot. Did you know, for example, that it’s currently fashionable in the world of plumbing sales to quote Cervantes at the prospective customers? I’m sitting here, trying to get a quote on a shower while a poor salesman is interpreting Don Quijote at me. “At least, it’s not Don DeLillo,” commented a colleague sardonically. Yes, thank Jesus for small mercies.

Miranda July vs Moa Herngren

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Miranda July (the author of All Fours) is more artistically gifted than Moa Herngren (the author of The Divorce). Still, if you are in the mood for a novel about the midlife crisis, I’d recommend Herngren.

For one, The Divorce gives space to both female and male experience of being in their early fifties. Herngren decided not to follow the fashionable trend of turning male characters into props who sit around waiting, supportively and silently, while their wives thrash around menopausally, destroying everything in sight. Herngren’s depiction of the male middle-aged life weariness is nuanced, kind, and very realistic.

Another reason is that Herngren’s characters aren’t rich, clueless bastards. These are regular people who struggle to pay the mortgage and worry about money. Most people can’t just drop everything and start bed-hopping around the country when middle age hits because nobody is rich enough for that. Herngren writes about normal, everyday people, and that makes the book a lot more useful. Middle age is difficult, and The Divorce reads like a handbook of what can go wrong and how to prevent it.

Of course, if All Fours were a literary masterpiece, none of this would matter. But it’s not. There’s talent there but not remotely enough to justify choosing this novel over The Divorce.

I recommend The Divorce very highly, even though the author piles it on way too thick to make her characters as representative of their type as possible. Besides, I’m eager to discuss it, so if you’ve read it or are planning to read, please make yourself known.

Book Notes: Moa Herngren’s The Divorce

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

After 32 years of “daily arguments about gender roles”, Niklas walks out on his wife Bea. Instantly, Bea’s sense of simmering irritation with the man she perceives as in constant need of her guidance turns to concern. Yes, she’s annoyed that Niklas spends too much time at the hospital where he works as a doctor, even though his earnings allow her to “do something meaningful with her life” in a vanity job. But still, how dare he walk out and avoid doing the chores she assigned to him!

Bea hops on her bike and rides in search of the wayward Niklas. It does cross her mind that she should have brushed her teeth and combed her hair but she rejects the idea of making herself look good for her husband. Sweaty, stinky, in Birkenstocks over grubby socks, she confronts Niklas and is stunned by his refusal to scurry back home. I could have stopped reading right then because people who wear Birkenstocks over socks have nobody to blame when their marriages collapse but I’m very interested in the “wifely drama” genre.

Women use books like Moa Herngren’s The Divorce to run through all sorts of scenarios that can imperil a marriage and find solutions before a problem arises. “Husband suddenly walks out” is one of the favorite female scenarios to explore. Herngren makes it way too easy for her readers, though, offering up an image of such a sad excuse for a wife that one would have to try really hard to reach her level of marital uselessness. Bea’s inability to formulate a single sentence free of exasperation or demand is comical, and so is her shock at finding out that this approach doesn’t evoke deep sexual longing towards her in her husband.

Niklas is a piss poor husband, too, of course. He’s man enough to get himself a girlfriend but is so terrified of his wife that he fails to inform her of that fact for months, forcing the miserable, Birkenstocked Bea to beg him, again and again, to tell her why he isn’t living at home.

There are still some useful things one can pick up from The Divorce, though. For instance, Bea is shocked to discover that Niklas left her for Maria Axelsson, a woman with scented candles and animal-print cushions, whom Bea and Niklas had spent years ridiculing. Lesson 1: if a man spends years ridiculing some random woman, he likes her. She’s a source of danger, especially if she is armed with animal-print cushions and you wear sandals over socks and don’t use deodorant.

Lesson 2: telling a dude that you want him “to take initiative” by doing exactly what you want him to do while looking enthusiastic is not going to lead anyplace nice. When a man takes initiative, there’s a strong probability that you won’t always like how that looks, so don’t be a Bea and demand initiative when what you really want is slavish obedience.

I don’t know if we have any young, unmarried people around here but this novel is a veritable textbook on how to screw up a marriage. With anybody less beaten down than the miserable Niklas, it would take only a few years of Bea’s marriage-killing strategies to turn the relationship into a smouldering wreck. Read The Divorce and do the exact opposite if you want your marriage to thrive.

The novel is a lot of fun, people. Highly recommended, enjoyable, light reading that’s screaming fun. Read it in a day to get rid of the horrible aftertaste from Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies, and the remedy worked.

Daddy President

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

I can never figure out if this guy is really that stupid or if he’s pretending in order to get likes from the clinically childish:

Obviously, not even in the most totalitarian of dictatorships in the tiniest of Caribbean states does the president personally run the government completely alone. It’s actually fantastic that the president isn’t all that relevant or necessary. It spares us a personality cult or a dictatorship. It saves us from one person having an outsize influence on all of us.

As an elected leader of a tiny collective, I can report that I had to leave work early today for personal reasons. And guess what? Nobody noticed. Everything continued rolling happily along. Everything worked just great. I would be a shitty leader if, several years in, I needed to hover around constantly, micromanaging everybody into the ground.

I’ve noticed that these complaints that “the president golfs too much instead of taking care of us” crop up about every president in existence. People perceive presidents as substitute dads and feel deprived if the dad du jour proves to be as inattentive and distant as their actual dad.

God only knows what unprocessed family drama will awaken in them when we get a female president, which at this point seems unavoidable. And which will make us all happy that there is a big impersonal machine keeping her from doing much.

If your dad is still living, call him, make peace, and stop looking for him in weird places. 

Catching up with Q&A

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

Here are some Q&As that have been languishing unattended:

Never heard of it but I looked it up and I’m very interested. Thanks for the recommendation!

You can get a very precise answer from doctors these day. They’ll tell you exactly how many eggs you’ve got left and what your prospects are. It varies from woman to woman pretty dramatically. If you are past 30, I suggest finding out ASAP because “I know somebody who gave birth at 43” might be completely irrelevant in your case. But until you lose the eggs, you are not too old.

If you are male and there’s a woman in your life who’s offering, go for it.

It’s propaganda, so I’m not interested. Russians are not gang raping toddlers and torturing 80-year-olds because they want “security guarantees.” I highly recommend saying something like this about any rapist (“he only raped these 16 women because he felt unsafe”) and observing the reaction. Only concerning the torture, rape and murder of Ukrainians is it acceptable to say things of such unconscionable idiocy.

Nation-states need history, tradition, roots. Even if they are completely invented, they are crucial. The British monarchy offers actual traditions and roots. People come together over the royal weddings, births, scandals. The royals are very cheap at the price for the value they provide. Even when people hate them and roll their eyes at them, they do it together.

The Spanish royals were interrupted by the long time stretch from 1927 to 1975, and they are unable to do as much heavy lifting as the British. If you are British, thank your lucky stars that you have this bunch of inbreds holding you together when other nations are scrambling to find at least something to do play this role. Usually, shared victimhood is an easy substitute. Let’s agree that is worse than the entertaining, funny royals.

Feminist Men

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

There is a male character in Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies. He is Javier, the husband of the school psychologist who enjoys transing children. We see him doing the dishes, feeding the baby, changing the baby, comforting the baby, cleaning. He’s always sweet, smiling, always completely supportive in a quiet, self-effacing manner.

Does this remind you of anything?

Yes, Javier is the “angel in the house”, a subservient, patriarchal woman.

For all of Piñeiro’s dedication to destroying the gender binary, she ends up recreating it. Her women are men and her men are women. They aren’t interesting, nuanced personalities but collections of the hoariest gender stereotypes.

So what was the point of all this if the result is the re-creation of the same gender binary but with the biological sexes switched?

In the novel, everybody envies Javier’s wife for snagging such an excellent husband but in reality this type of man isn’t deeply popular.

Book Notes: Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

In spite of the inane quotes from Angela Davis and Rebecca Solnit, I still decided to give Claudia Piñeiro’s novel a chance and ploughed on until the bitter, bitter end. And bitter it was, indeed, because it turned out that the whole point of The Time of the Flies is that any man has “the right to be a woman” and it’s “a right that must be recognized.” These are quotes, in case anybody didn’t catch on.

As I’ve been saying, the narrative of “rights” leads to very insane places if we don’t approach this concept carefully and intelligently.

Aside from Piñeiro’s insistence that it’s crucial to trans children in schools and keep it secret from their parents (which is hard to ignore because it’s what the novel is about), nothing about the book works. The way it’s put together is clumsy. The characters make no sense. Everything is fake. And I swear, she used to be an excellent writer. When she wrote about Argentina and things that are happening in Argentina and are relevant to Argentineans, she was an excellent bloody writer. But then, for some utterly confusing reason, she decided to abandon all that and write for the English-speaking admirers of Angela bloody Davis, and I’m so upset because this was one of my favorite Latin American authors and now she’s all “rah-rah, let’s prattle on about the stupid Anglo fixation on transing kids like it’s the most important issue on the planet.” It’s so subservient, so pathetic. The woman threw away her God-given talent for … this? To appeal to some marginal group of overheated Anglos?

I’m really upset right now. I could have spent these two days reading something worthwhile and instead got saddled with this crap.