I always thought I liked Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a classic of the romance genre. But then I read the novel du Maurier ripped off to write her bestseller and found out that she had taken a fragrant bouquet and turned it into a herbarium.

Before there was ever Rebecca, there was Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, a real work of art that “inspired” du Maurier to rewrite it and make a hash out of it. I highly recommend getting both novels (Vera is free on Kindle) and reading them in chronological order. See for yourself which one your prefer.

Vera, a novel about a deeply insensitive, moronically narcissistic man who marries a young, naive idiot of a girl, is so well-written that you’ll laugh on every page. Von Arnim had a wonderful sense of humor. People find this novel to be dark and disturbing, and I’m sure that the conjunction of a scary plot and a humorous tone heightens the enjoyment for the readers. But the disturbing side of the novel is lost on me. I have a close, life-long experience of dealing with a clinical narcissist, and as a result I’m completely desensitized.

I understand, though, why du Maurier must have wanted to rewrite the extremely realistic Vera and turn it into a sappy Cinderella fantasy.

I’ll give just a couple of quotes, so you can see the delicious writing. A man is annoyed that an aunt stands between him and his beloved:

Miss Entwhistle was so little that he could have brushed her aside with the back of one hand; yet here again the strong monster public opinion stepped in and forced him to acquiesce in any plan she chose to make for Lucy, however desolate it left him, merely because she stood to her in the anæmic relationship of aunt. During two mortal days, as he waited about in that garden so grievously infested by Miss Entwhistle, sounds of boxes being moved and drawers being opened and shut came through the windows, but except at meals there was no Lucy.

And this is when a young woman’s friends discover she has a suitor:

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy’s aunt to himself, and on the ground of being Jim’s most devoted friend ask her straight questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why. Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be and do it somewhere else.

A woman after an unpleasant conversation with a man feels uncomfortable that she had eaten breakfast at his house:

At the other end Miss Entwhistle was walking away lost in thought. Her position was thoroughly unpleasant. She disliked extraordinarily that she should at that moment contain an egg and some coffee which had once been Wemyss’s.

And my favorite:

All day underneath everything he did, everything he said and thought, lay indignation, and so he knew he was married.

Again, if I strain my imagination very strongly, I can somewhat intuit why people can be discomfited by the story in Vera. So be forewarned.

But it’s a brilliant, brilliant book. And it’s not in Spanish! It’s free! You’ll read it in a couple of days, I promise. I know everybody has a list of books they plan to read but this one is really worth it. The characters are out of this world. Even those who appear in just a couple of paragraphs are impossible to forget.

I also want to mention that every online source says that the marriage in Vera was based on von Arnim’s marriage to Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank. This makes no sense to me because Vera‘s heroine is an extremely naive, childish type, which is what makes the story work. When von Arnim married Frank, she was a widowed mother of five who had moved between continents and countries, spoke a boatload of languages, cohabited with famous personalities, and was 50 years old on her wedding day. So a blushing ingenue she was not. But hey, if every person upset with an ex came out with a brilliant novel instead of polluting social media with the boring details, that would be pretty great.

https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1678423647415828482?t=O7DvbNeIGhD_S2AjNVPQnQ&s=19

DEI can go suck on a monkey toe but anybody who uses unpaid labor is a mega dick. That some desperate idiots agree to be exploited doesn’t make it less of a dick move.

Yes, they “freely choose” to work without pay. Just like we can freely choose always to pay people for working.

At the writing accelerator, we all told the group what projects we are working on.

“Oh, it’s in Ukrainian!” the group leader said when I explained mine. “So we won’t be able to read your drafts!”

And thank goodness for that because people here would get coronaries if they could read my new book.

Marching and chanting in support of the war in St Petersburg:

The flag you see in the video is the Russian Imperial flag.

Look at how young they are. As the person who posted the videos says, this is St Petersburg, known as a cultured city. Imagine the significantly poorer and consequently much more rabid cities of the interior.

Not only have these young people spent their whole lives being prepared for war, they also don’t remember the USSR. And that’s a bad thing because they think that the USSR is this magical place where everything was amazing. That’s the USSR they’ve seen on TV and heard about at school. That USSR – you’d want to go there, too, even though it never existed anywhere except Russian propaganda and the minds of left-wing academics in the US.

There’s this old Soviet joke where a woman was really fed up with her alcoholic husband. She found a dead cat in the street, brought it home, and put it in her husband’s jar of moonshine, hoping that seeing the dead animal would put him off the brew.

But when she came home after work, she found her husband squeezing out the cat’s corpse over the jar, saying, “Come on, kitty! Give me just one more drop, shall you?”

I always remember this joke when I see “the January 6 insurrection” pop up on the news again.

Now I know where Zelensky gets it:

It’s one of those quirks of history that Joe Biden got a chance for a replay of that moment with today’s Menachem Begin.

The 17 Magazine list of “books every girl needs to read before she turns 17” includes a love story of two gay boys and a story of a boy coming out as queer nonbinary. Not only are all the books on the list painfully devoid of literary merit, they also teach the young readers the great feminist lesson that women of all ages must constantly preoccupy themselves with the problems of men.

It’s great to see all these feminist advances coming at us from every direction.

A local library is introducing a new children’s book at the park:

“People and bodies” is a slip but it reveals a lot. This is a mentality that sees people and bodies as two separate categories.

Diversity, in this worldview, means different-looking bodies that house identical people. Of course, that’s impossible because a person and that person’s body are the same thing. Diversity policies keep failing as a result of this unrealistic belief.

This way of thinking also produces the idea of mismatched bodies with people inside them who are suffering because of the mismatch.

It creates the idea of addiction and depression being the result of a glitch in the body that is unconnected to the actions of people.

The utterly misguided belief that people and bodies are different things drives a lot of the ills we experience.

This rule is true for any area of life:

If there’s an expression or a phrase that suddenly appears and everybody starts to repeat it, it’s probably propaganda.

15 days to slow the curve, life-saving care, black and brown bodies, until you fix the 2020 election, a threat to our democracy, slow-walking us into WW3.

All these rapidly propagating cliches aim to take away our own thinking process. They are comfortable and pleasing but they turn us into easily programmable robots. This willing self-robotization is far more dangerous than any AI.