I don’t have that much left to do in the book. I have finished the chapters on:

1. Spanish Civil War and dictatorship.

2. Economic crisis of 2008-2012 and corruption.

3. EU membership and what a letdown that’s been.

4. Neoliberalism and globalization.

5. Ukrainian writers who write in Spanish.

All I have left is Catalonian and Basque separatism. And the conclusion. The intro us mostly done but, as always, I’m having trouble finishing strong. I’ll do something very personal and intense in the conclusion to avoid a watered-down finish.

The title is Contemporary Spanish Literature for Ukrainians, and my dream is to do a series, adding Contemporary Latin American and Contemporary American literature.

And no, I don’t want this book to be published in translation to any language. The things I say there, I’d be immediately unpersonned everywhere except in Ukraine. The whole point is to give me a chance to say things I can’t say aloud.

We are experiencing a day-long meeting of department chairs which I’m treating as an intense writing day. While people are discussing whatever it is chairs are supposed to care about, I’m churning out my word count.

Then people will ask how I manage to publish so much. This is how.

My niece came to visit us straight from a trip to Marrakech. She says the weather is worse here. Of course, I couldn’t take the kids outside yesterday in this heat because that would be child abuse. I took them to the local trampoline park. It’s great fun but it cost me $86 for 3 kids to jump for 90 minutes. It’s easy to be a good parent if you can afford it.

On the positive side, being at the trampoline park encouraged Klara to set the first long-term goal of her life. She wants to train herself to clear the obstacle course at the park with ease by the end of the summer. Working in small increments towards a far-away goal is a crucial and rare life skill, so I’m happy.

Spoiled brats pouting over their hurt fee-fees are the same everywhere:

But hey, let’s look on the positive side. It turns out that Russians do know how to protest when the issue actually matters to them.

The Ukrainian winner was initially disqualified and stripped of the win until it became clear that viewers were not impressed.

Friends, department Chairs and their spouses are invited to an evening reception at the Dean’s house. Is it customary to bring a gift in such situations? What should one bring if so?

I don’t want to be the only person either with or without a gift. I have provided myself with a defense from unwanted socialization in the form of N who I will talk to exclusively. But what is the proper procedure gift-wise?

A great article on the myth of the Russian traditional values that some facile individuals take at face value:

The militant Russian religious conservatism of the twenty-first century, paradoxically, mirrors the Soviet anti-religious socialism of the twentieth century. Their common feature is a shameless instrumentalization of religion, with the consent of the latter. . . Russia’s invocation of “traditional values” rests on the completely secular view that moral teachings can be severed from religion; and the result is that these values have been vacated of any religious meaning and become a blunt instrument of the Russian state.

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/07/90088/

Many people don’t know this but Stalin treated no foreign dignitary with the same respect and kindness that he did Patriarch Sergii Stragorodskii (the head in church parlance) of the Orthodox church in the USSR. When the Patriarch visited Stalin in the Kremlin, Stalin shocked his staffers by getting up, walking out to meet the church leader and walk him to his seat. This is a form of respect nobody got from Stalin ever. Even in the secret meeting with Hitler that some historians insist took place, I can’t imagine Stalin being so deferential.*

In return, Patriarch Sergii declared that Stalin was divinely anointed to hold power and directed every Soviet priest to praise Stalin by name during service. He also directed priests to report what they heard in confession to state police. Which they proceeded to do until 1991. I personally witnessed the public shaming of an 11-year-old classmate whose priest had informed the KGB that she attended church service which meant she was ideologically unsound.

This is the instrumentalization of religion that the linked article is talking about. And it’s no wonder that since 1991 Russian Orthodox Church continued exactly as before.

* I don’t necessarily believe that the meeting took place but there are two and a half unaccounted days in Stalin’s recorded agenda in 1939 and nobody ever explained where he was that had to be shrouded in such secrecy.

I hope that, as usual with NBC, “many” means three. And they are the article author’s BFFs.

In any case, it should be illegal for people with the mental age of 3 to date.

I’m enjoying every new book by Laura Lippman more than the previous one, which shows that she is growing as a writer. Prom Mom is her best novel so far.

One of the characters is a rich, very woke, child-free woman who obsesses over “words that kill” (“shouldn’t we say differently figured instead of disfigured?”), frets over “the privilege conferred by her whiteness “, adores her Peloton bike, sees racism everywhere, and mistakes her menopause for “long COVID”.

I wondered why Lippman suddenly came out with an acid parody of wokeness but it turns out she was writing this book during the collapse of her marriage to the mega woke David Simon. As a rich, successful writer, Lippman can’t openly say anything against leftist beliefs but her book speaks for her. Simon must have really gotten on her nerves with the endless virtue-signaling.

Mind you, in the very last 3 or 4 pages of the book Lippman does try to give a woke slant to the novel. But it’s too late. After 300 pages of showing the outlandish pretentiousness, triviality and smugness of the woke, nothing can change the overall impact of the novel.

Prom Mom is a COVID novel. You can see in it exactly why the rich childless people adored the lockdowns. I was curious about the moment when the first COVID novels would drop, and it’s finally here. Finding out how these spoiled creatures experienced the lockdowns, how they turned the lockdowns into an opportunity for even greater consumerism, how they cared not a whit about the suffering all this caused – all that is very sobering.

This is a novel where every single person except for the little baby murdered in the first pages is utterly despicable. All characters are nasty. But what do you expect? These are people who receive million-dollar inheritances and give $75,000 Christmas gifts while bleating about how victimized they are. American writers love to write about the petty dramas of the wealthy but Lippman does it in a way that shows how repellent these people are.

It’s a good book, people. I read it on the day it was published and couldn’t put it down until I was through. This was the day when I was the parent of record of three kids, so my interest in the book had to be high for me to plough through it so fast. Looking at the world through the eyes of these rich leftists is truly something. I kind of feel bad for them now.

Elizabeth von Arnim is one of those sad cases where talent is impotent to overcome bad branding. And if I already posted about this, I apologize. It’s very hot around here, and my brain is melting.

Von Arnim published her first book under the title Elizabeth’s German Garden. There was no author’s name, only the title. The book was a mega-bestseller, earning her the insane amount of £10,000 in early 20th-century money. Her next book came out as “from the author of Elizabeth’s German Garden“. And from then on, she was known to the readers as “Elizabeth”. The inverted commas were part of the brand name. No last name. Just “Elizabeth”. Totally reminds me of “Just Jack” in the Will and Grace sitcom.

This worked well while people remembered the original Elizabeth’s German Garden book. But after that, there was no way of preserving these books for posterity. You can’t go to the library and request a book by Elizabeth.

“Elizabeth who?” you will be asked.

You can’t put “Elizabeth” in textbooks or scholarly pieces, either. As a result, enormously less talented authors of the era are widely known, while “Elizabeth” was forgotten for decades until somebody dug her out, gave her a last name and started promoting her work. Even then it was already too late to make her a household name like she deserves but at least she’s back in print.

There’s a lesson here that I can’t formulate because it’s too bloody hot but you get my meaning.

Thank God I didn’t go to see Oppenheimer! Turns out that the leading role is played by that extremely ugly and talentless actor from Peaky Blinders. That was one horrible show. Everything about it sucked bullets. The ridiculous plot, the bad writing, the clumsy acting, and the hideous actors. I understand that the characters are supposed to be inbred, but did they have to be that believable at it when they were completely unbelievable about everything else?

In any case, who wants to watch a movie about the atomic bomb at this particular moment? I’d rather stay at home reading my new Laura Lippmann about woke, fussy millionaires obsessed with their teenage sex pranks.