I watched an interview with N’s favorite human rights activist in Russia (yes, a few still exist), and he says that for almost two years no convict in Russia could get released on parole. Convicts were being saved up for future channeling into the army. The numbers of these prison inmates who already died in Ukraine are staggering.

The US State Department considers Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish to be the easiest to learn because they closely cognate with English. They are denominated “world languages.”

Albanian, Hindi, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish and Ukrainian, among others, are considered “hard languages” because of their significant linguistic and cultural differences from English.

Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are “super hard languages.”

Curiously, there is a separate category called “other languages” that includes German, Indonesian, Malay and Swahili. These are considered harder than French or Swedish but easier than Hindi or Polish.

I don’t know much about Swedish but I wonder why it’s considered so much easier for an English speaker than German. Also, I don’t get why Spanish or Romanian and more linguistically and culturally related to English than German.

I’m completely obsessed with Edward Hopper, and here’s a great article on the new exhibit of his art at the Whitney in New York.

I can’t explain it but Hopper’s paintings look to me as if the painter could stare straight into my brain. My whole life I’ve had dreams of being in an unknown, empty city that looks exactly like Hopper’s paintings. It’s as if by some strange mistake I regularly plugged into the same cosmic channel from which Hopper drew his images.

I was taught in college that the famous Spanish author Carmen Laforet wrote nothing after the publication of her mega-bestseller Nothing in 1944. Then I found out that she actually wrote a lot, and it was really good. But what she wrote didn’t conform to the expectations of what the critics and professors thought she should be writing, so it was ignored and consigned to the trash bin of history.

Nothing was written when Laforet was only 23. It’s full of silences and avoidances because she was very young and had no idea what she wanted to say. This allowed critics to read whatever they felt like into those silences. And what they wanted was the standard ultra-progressive stuff. Then it turned out that Laforet wasn’t progressive but a very religious conservative.

This created a huge cognitive dissonance. She’s talented, so she has to be liberal, right? To preserve the illusion, some people ignored everything she wrote after 1944 while others tried to explain it away with the tried and true “what she really wanted to say must have been the exact opposite of what she did say.”

The biggest embarrassment to the believers in the liberal Laforet was her novel The New Woman published in 1955 of which the author was very proud. In the novel, a vain, selfish and immature woman called Paulina has an affair where she cheats on her husband with a relative who’s married to a dying woman. Paulina leaves her husband and child and goes to live on her own while she waits for her lover’s wife to die of leukemia. So far so good. The plot sounds like a regular laudatory piece about women’s liberation in The Atlantic. This could only get more liberal if Paulina left her husband for a woman or decided to become a man.

Instead, Paulina experiences a religious conversion, starts going to church, and slowly and painfully realizes that personal growth can’t consist of jumping from bed to bed. The description of her conversion and attempts to live a Christian life are based on the author’s own conversion to Catholicism. Paulina is a complicated person, and her maturation isn’t easy or quick. You’d think, finally, there’s a female character who experiences growth, yay! But she doesn’t grow in the only approved direction, so the novel and the character had to be forgotten.

I don’t know what’s funnier, seeing the critics try to figure out what Paulina’s conversion must really mean or observing their attempts to “queer” the novel’s author who supposedly managed to be a covert lesbian between giving birth to five children and going to Mass daily. The simple possibility that Paulina really experienced a moment of grace and Laforet was really a sincere Catholic simply doesn’t occur.

Leaving aside all the preconceived garbage and all the inane beliefs in how liberating it must be for all women on the planet to want the exact same thing, the novel offers a pretty profound perspective on what love, marriage, and personal growth mean.

Thankfully, 70 years after the novel’s publication, people seem to be ready to read The New Woman on its own terms. Yesterday, I read an article by a young professor of literature who analyzed the novel without scoffing at religious faith and dismissing marriage and family as horribly oppressive. Not only did he understand the novel, he connected it to its literary and religious sources in St Teresa and St John of the Cross.

I wish I had known about this novel when I wrote about the female Bildungsroman. The New Woman is a very rare example of a successful female Bildung in literature where a woman actually does grow. Usually, these novels are about frustrated development where the female characters end up crushed, dead, or crazy at the end. And here we have somebody who has an intense inner life and manages to mold her life according to her own judgment.

I will never stop laughing:

The capacity of these people to erase their memory on cue will never quit being entertaining. Remember how we kept trying to drum it into their thick skulls that “with COVID” isn’t the same as “from COVID”? It’s only been 3 years, and now these intellectual invalids are brightly chirping these same phrases like they invented them.

Just so that everybody understands what it means to have an obsessive, addiction-prone personality.

I was asked to write a review of a collection of articles about the famous Spanish author Carmen Laforet. She is the author of the second most widely read Spanish novel after Don Quixote titled Nothing. It’s a hugely, hugely famous novel. All most people know about Spanish literature is Cervantes and Laforet. This isn’t because Nothing is that great but because it’s extremely easy to teach, so it ends up on a million course syllabi.

Like all students of Spanish, I had to read Laforet’s Nothing – a female Bildungsroman, for my sins – several times. Unlike most students, however, I didn’t particularly like it. This concluded my knowledge of Carmen Laforet but I couldn’t say no to writing the review because the person who asked me is somebody I can’t deny.

As soon as I started reading the edited volume, however, I became possessed of an irresistible desire to read everything that Laforet published after Nothing. Then I decided to read a biography of hers. I say “a biography” but I have a strong suspicion I will end up reading all three of her biographies.

None of this is remotely needed for my review. Laforet is not one of the writers I study, she’s decades before my sphere of interest, but the need to know everything about her came over me, and I can’t resist.

By the way, I found out some fascinating stuff about this writer that I’ll share soon. Because it’s not a real obsession if you can’t persecute everybody else to death with it.

Kamyshin is the CEO of Ukrainian Railways. If he can get his trains to run on time under the bombs, you can meet your deadline no sweat. This isn’t meant to make anybody feel guilty but inspired. We are all capable of greatness simply because we are human. Be like Kamyshin and take pride in achievement.

And now excuse me, I have a deadline to meet.

This is as stupid as the previous drama around classified documents and Trump. No, forget that. It’s more stupid because it’s nothing but an imitation of what the opponent did.

If you want to win – and I’m not talking about politics right now – you can’t be a resentful, pouty follower. You need your own strategy that you carry out as if the opponent were so much dust at your feet.

Talent is not a reward for good behavior. Neither are brilliance, luck, or success. If this feels weird or wrong, congratulations, you are a Protestant.

It sounds like a great idea to get rid of the church hierarchy, address God directly, and interpret the Bible yourself. But then you end up having no external moral authority. The only moral authority is yourself. So you have to judge everything and everyone all the time. Pure enjoyment disappears because every act that can bring joy turns into an opportunity to pass judgment.

As a result, whenever you say “X did / wrote / said something brilliant”, people interpret this as an opportunity to stage a symbolic trial where X will be judged for everything he ever did and will always be triumphantly declared morally flawed. And everything flawed has to be destroyed because it can taint us.

The thirst to enact spectacles of outrage over somebody’s imperfection is unquenchable. All humans are flawed, so as long as there are human beings, there will be opportunities to bemoan human imperfection.

There is a cure for this hyper-vigilant state of exhausting moral judgment. It’s to accept that some things are independent of our desire or judgment. Some things can never be understood, and that’s fine.

I feel absolutely rabid against anyone who tries to mar my kid’s perfect childhood innocence with unnecessary stories of horrors, injustices, racisms, Holocausts, genocides, pandemics, divorces, abusive parents, sufferings, etc.

There’s absolutely no chance she’ll fail to find out about all this. We all get to know about this crap for decades and decades of our lives. And the only thing that helps us bear the knowledge without being paralyzed by it is the strength and resilience we gather during that short time of childhood innocence when everything is perfect, simple and good. Every extra hour in that state of grace is valuable.

The short years of childhood innocence stand between us and crippling anxiety, fear of life, and an incapacity to feel safe. What kind of a perverted bastard tries to steal them from a child?