Do you know that story about Salvador Dali where people thought he painted the way he did because he didn’t know how to paint in a realist manner to produce the perfect liking? Dali whipped out a perfectly realistic drawing to shut them up. I did something like this in my reading group.

I was in this academic reading group where we read and discussed books every week. Everybody was very woke. They’d come up with these ultra-woke readings, and I’d grind them into dust. It went on and on. Then I decided to have some fun and in the penultimate session, I did a Dali and went on a 30-minute woke rant producing the wokest reading of the entire year. And the worst part was that nobody got the joke. I saw people furiously taking notes. They’ll now probably write articles using these nutso-cuckoo things I was saying.

I read this very obscure Spanish novel last week, and now I’m desperate to talk about it. But it’s been silenced by critics for 50 years, so now nobody knows it exists. There’s nobody for me to talk to about this novel.

Then the program of my February conference is published. And guess what? The guy who speaks after me on my panel… will be speaking about this very novel.

I’ve only ever seen this scholar on a screen but we have this weird thing going where we end up reading the same books at the same time completely by accident. And now it happened again.

A reader’s life is full of the strangest surprises.

Turns out that the last two big mass shootings in California were carried out by retirement-age men. The Half Moon Bay shooter was a 66-year-old Chinese man and the Monterey Park shooter was a 72-year-old Vietnamese grandpa.

Is it some COVID-induced madness? Men this age didn’t use to run around mowing down people.

Ukrainian Railways – the one that manages to run trains on time during a war – got Boris Johnson to wear its promo hat that says “Carriage numbering starts from the head of the train.” Johnson is now appearing everywhere in the hat:

As a result, everybody wants the hat. Ukrainian Railways will sell lots of hats and make its trains even better.

Moral of the story: if you can’t get into their heads, get on their heads.

What’s curious is that the Ukrainian student who comes to us from air raids and bomb shelters has a lot less anxiety than my regular students. She felt like an oasis of calmness.

Ours was by far the longest conversation I have ever had in my office. Usually, I get up and pretend I need to leave for an urgent meeting after 15 minutes at most. I get very antsy when I’m boxed in a small space with people.

The student said it was a relief to talk with somebody who understands sarcasm and doesn’t try to be nicey-nice all the time.

I got so many leopard pictures on my social media and in my text messages today, I feel ready to start a zoo.

It only took forever but it looks like Leopards might be coming our way. Time to celebrate. Of course, I’m still working but eventually I’ll celebrate.

I received this from the editors of the volume in Spain to which I want to contribute:

They think we are complete idiots but I can’t feel offended because after years of working with academics… I don’t blame these editors.

I just met our exchange student from Ukraine and we spoke for over 2 hours. I started thinking when was the last time I spoke in Ukrainian for that long and realized that the answer is never. There was never an interlocutor.

It was hard. Harder than in Spanish and about a million times harder than in English. The student is from a Russian-speaking family in Odessa but, as many people in Ukraine today, she switched completely to Ukrainian. Her parents are my age, and they are Soviet-nostalgic. She says I’m the first person my age she ever met who says there was absolutely nothing good about the USSR.

The student says she’s shocked by the US dating culture. And by how politically correct and constrained in their speech everybody is. She’s been here for 18 days, and already she’s noticing things.

I’m taking her out to a nice restaurant on Sunday because I have a profound impulse to feed the kid.