What a gem of a book, my friends. Exceptionally enjoyable, charming, and lovely. Some reviewers complain that nothing happens in this novel but it’s a diary of a provincial lady. What do they expect to happen? This is a book about life. Life is what happens. Normal, often clumsy, sometimes disappointing life.

I highly recommend reading Delafield’s excellent novel and then following it with Richard B Wright’s devastating remake, 70 years later, in Clara Callan.

Diary of a Provincial Lady is very funny and light-hearted but I did manage to find a disturbing subtext in it. Trust me to find disturbing subtexts in everything. The way the narrator feels in the 1930s will be extremely easy for many women to identify with today. The same endless unhappiness with her own appearance, the same terror of the word “age”, the same incapacity to end a boring conversation out of onerous politeness, the same tendency to wrap her relationship with her children in layers of guilt. Many of the provincial lady’s monologues I could be reading on Facebook today.

An excellent novel. A perfect summertime read.

In 3 months, N achieved incredible advances with his Spanish. From absolute zero he went to the point where he tells stories, enacts funny dialogues, and does it all with almost no accent.

A strong intellect is a wonderful thing, indeed.

This is true. What we fear, what disturbs and defeats us is what we are meant to be doing. In other words, it disturbs us for a reason.

The journey towards “a work-life balance” tends to end up in burnout and depression because the pitting of work and life against each other is wrong.

Also, this one is absolutely crucial once you move into the middle age:

Middle age is when you become a conduit through which good things travel to other people. It feels great and reminds you that you have reached a great place in your relationship with the world. If you don’t become a conduit by 50, you’ll collapse into the dreaded midlife crisis.

Forget balance, and start thinking conduit.

By declaring that everyone could Be Like Me (if only they were properly socialized), the clever can, with clear conscience, continue to surreptitiously wage class war against the clueless.

Steve Sailer, Noticing

The idea that all brains are equally capable of performing all operations is the great scam of our times. “You aren’t trying hard enough!” “You will achieve mastery if you invest 10,000 hours.” “Everybody can succeed in college.” These are egregious lies that hurt people, saddle them with debt, and undermine their lives. But we aren’t noticing because those who have the capacity to do so benefit from not noticing.

I was going to skip Sailer’s article about Jackie Robinson because I vaguely know the story and have no interest in whatever sport he played. But as I was leafing through the piece, my eyes snatched the following sentence: 

We tend to be more outraged by minor slights to winners than by mass atrocities against downtrodden losers.

This is undeniable. Compassion – which means a common, or shared suffering – starts when we identify with the sufferer. What if this pain was visited upon me? What if I were hurt in this way? It’s harder to feel compassion when you don’t want to put yourself in the sufferer’s place at all. And it’s always easier and more pleasant to identify with somebody you see as “just like me”.

Show me who elicits your compassion, and I’ll tell you how you feel about yourself.

Since becoming department Chair 4 years ago, I have found out that every university service – be it accounting, HR, advisement, admissions, interlibrary loans, disability services, or anything else – has one person who’s carrying the workload of the entire unit, knows how everything functions, and guarantees the smoothness of operations. In addition to that one crucial person, there’s a number of confused, bumbling individuals in each unit who know nothing and often get aggressive as a result.

Interacting with these departments always consists in identifying that one individual who actually works and addressing her directly, bypassing the 15 or 20 deadwood workers. After 4 years on the job, I have a list of the people who know what they are doing and interact with them directly. These are always the most cheerful, energetic workers who enjoy what they do and love helping others.

Nobody would even notice if the rest of the workers were fired tomorrow. So it’s not just Twitter.

This is a quote from a 2003 review of Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment:

Murray expects that almost no art from the second half of the 20th century will be remembered in 200 years. Indeed, Europe, homeland of geniuses, has collapsed into a comfortable cultural stasis reminiscent of Rome in the 2nd century A.D. In addition to Murray’s philosophical explanations, I’d also point to causes such as the genocide of Europe’s highest-achieving ethnic group (Jews were about six times more likely than gentiles to become significant figures from 1870 onward); the rise of anti-elitist ideologies; and the decline of nationalism. From Vergil to Verdi, great men engendered great works to celebrate their nations. Nobody, however, seems likely to create an epic glorifying the European Union.

Noticing (2024)

The review also mentions that female achievement only grew in literature but not in other fields since the 1950s. The percentage of women receiving Novel Prizes was actually cut in half in the second half of the twentieth century compared to the first. This confirms the findings of my first book that women responded to the triumph of feminism by embracing high degrees of self-infantilization (see the first post of the day, as well.)

The difference in correlation with voting between this standard-of-housing index and the overall standard-of-living index suggests, once again, that it’s housing costs, rather than other costs such as groceries or health care, that are crucial to voting Republican or Democrat.
Despite the explanatory power of the Dirt Gap and the Mortgage Gap, these concepts have not been widely discussed.
The problem limiting their popularity may be that they are too objective, too morally neutral.
What people want to hear instead are explanations for why they, personally, are ethically and culturally better than their enemies.

Noticing, Steve Sailer

This is an article from 2005, way before the current inflation that is changing people’s strategy. But the highlighted portion is very true. Moral superiority is addictive, and people seek it out everywhere.

I know, the commenting function has gone to the dogs recently. It’s not you, it’s WordPress futzing with a system that worked perfectly and needed exactly zero improvement. But employees have to justify their salaries, so they improved the comment box into a sorry state. I hope the changes get rolled back soon.

Yes, it’s totally a Tesla Cybertruck. Klara says the owner is the Dad of one of the girls at school. I never expected any rich kids to be at that school, so now I wonder.

Technological advances aren’t always great, and that’s a theme that unites Tesla and the WordPress comment box.

We have removed ourselves to an unpeopled place for a mini-vacation:

It’s not completely unpeopled, to be honest. We came across the owner several times. He used to be in the Secret Service, so it’s impossible to predict where he’s going to crop up.