I’m kind of depressed after spending time at this conference and talking to colleagues from many different colleges in the US and Canada. Everybody has horror stories about language programs being shut down, tenure lines eliminated, colleagues pushed into early retirement or outright fired. People have to teach courses they aren’t remotely qualified to teach (like me and my Molière course that starts on Monday).

The colleagues are all wonderful people, and they are trying to put a brave face on it but it’s all so sad. We all came to thriving programs and are witnessing their agony and demise. We had a great thing going with truly the best higher education system on the planet, and we’ve pissed it all away. Yippee for bloody us.

This is the Plaza Mayor of San Sebastián:

If you look closely, you’ll see that there are numbers over each balcony door:

Here they are:

These are not apartment numbers. But what are they? How were these numbers used historically?

At the conference banquet, I was out of luck. The entree featured delicate white fish with a large pickled tomato as garnish. I’m a lifelong fan of pickled tomatoes but they should not share a plate with white fish. They are pungent, overpowering. The fish gets completely lost by their side. Plus, nobody can eat a pickled tomato correctly in polite company. People went at the tomatoes with fork and knife, which immediately got the juice to burst out and soak the fish.

People truly take culinary experimentation too far. If you have a good, fresh piece of fish, all you need to do is not mess with it too much, and everybody will be happy.

This lady just picked her husband up from the airport, kissed him and immediately went to the passenger seat lmao

— 808s & Backaches (@Craig__b) June 24, 2024

That’s exactly what I do. I don’t get why it’s funny.

It’s interesting that one can behave in a way that’s completely normal to one yet to other people it looks weird. Speaking of which, Klara and I came up with the following joke after observing a small crowd of completely naked elderly people on the beach in San Sebastián:

“Hey, body parts! Whatcha doing?”

“Oh, just hanging out.”

Since there are, fortunately, no screens and, unfortunately, no siblings, how can a kid occupy herself in down times on vacation?

In the past 10 days, our kid made copious amounts of bead jewelry, paper dollies with large paper wardrobes, and sea shell decorations.

Today, she made this installation as a surprise for me while I was at the conference:

These are all bookmarks. Except for the toilet paper rolls which are there to give a 3D aspect to the installation.

Without screens, children’s creativity is free to flourish. I highly recommend.

Your progressive beliefs are a religion of sorts. Only your God isn’t in the heavens. You moved God into people. Everything that was clear, intelligent and necessary in religion, in your teaching is foggy, invented, and utterly useless.

– Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Balance (1912)

Vynnychenko was a best-selling Ukrainian writer and the Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Republic in 1918. Balance was one of his early novels where he tells about the lives of revolutionaries exiled in Paris. This isn’t one of his most accomplished novels but the portrayal of last century wokesters stuns with its continued relevance.

Vynnychenko was such a sincere socialist that, as he shared many years later, he believed that when socialism arrived, there would never be bad weather again. When the long-awaited and passionately desired socialism finally came and culminated in the only form of government it can possibly culminate in, which is Stalinism, Vynnychenko was compensated for his life-long fight for socialism with exile and a complete erasure of his name and work in Ukraine. Even now, much of his work has not been published.

He was a writer first, though, and in his literary work did not show progressives as any better than they were. Even in 1912, when he wrote Balance, Vynnychenko offered a devastating portrayal of his fellow socialists. Spoiled children of rich parents, they engage in acts of adolescent rebellion that include sexual perversions, satanism, and all sorts of addictions. They are physically and morally degenerate yet believe themselves to be carriers of superior morality. The depths of their condescension towards “workers” whom they strive to “liberate” are unfathomable.

In 1912, the phenomenon of spoiled brats clamoring for a revolution was new. Nobody could say for certain how the story would end. Today, however, we do know. Maybe it’s time we started learning from the mistakes of the past.

Food continues to be a problem. Klara won’t eat anything on offer, and nobody opens for dinner before 8 pm, which is terribly late for our provincial souls. We were rescued today by an Indian restaurant which opened as early as 7 pm and offered such good food that Klara agreed to eat some plain rice and 1,5 cubes of chicken. This is her 6-month ration of chicken, so I’m happy.

Whoever starts opening for dinner at 4 pm for the tourist crowd and offers American-style kid menu in this city will make buckets of money.

On a positive side, N bought his first Spanish book that he plans to read in the original. It’s by the only Spanish-language author known in the post-Soviet space in the 1990s.

In the photo, you can see a very fancy hotel (on the right) where I stayed once but never again. The personnel was so obsequious that they talked to guests as if we were on the verge of expiring of some horrific disease. I’m not used to be treated like a precious porcelain of the Ming dynasty, and it all felt deeply uncomfortable.

I was walking around a local bookshop and was enchanted (pun!) to find a beautifully edited collection of books by Elizabeth von Arnim:

I had no idea she had been discovered and translated into Spanish. Such joy!

Von Arnim is an excellent author and I recommend her books in any language.

Turns out that retirement-age men getting completely naked on the beach is a new trend here in San Sebastián. We saw another one today. He got so desperate that he started climbing gigantic boulders by the pier with the goal of towering over the bathers and ensuring that nobody failed to see him.

The overwhelming quantity of Palestinian flags now started to make sense. People don’t know what to do with themselves in the midst of unrelenting opulence and beauty, and they experiment with ugliness to break the monotony of placid enjoyment.

Shop attendants and receptionists in France are, indeed, stereotypically and almost comically rude. I’m starting to think they play it up on purpose to delight the tourists who are eager to have the real French experience of proverbial rudeness.

My French exceeded my wildest hopes, though. One woman was so taken in that she addressed a very animated speech at me that I understood only very vaguely. At the height of my linguistic enthusiasm, I immediately bought a French book and started reading it. Which, as we well know, is my response to any eventuality that befalls me.

Photos don’t begin to transmit how beautiful the views actually are. Unfortunately, the bus trip to France from Spain was so jerky that we dedicated the first hour in the country to a competition in projectile vomiting. But it was worth the trouble because this is the most stunning place we’ve ever seen.

Klara is unimpressed with the views. “Yes, yes, I know,” she says sarcastically. “This is yet another most beautiful view on the planet. Can I have another ice cream while you are at it?”

Ice cream here has an absolutely Soviet taste, which is a high compliment.