Thanks to The Poisonwood Bible, I have developed a greater benevolence towards the idea of cultural appropriation. Instead of reading the brilliant works of literature by post-colonial writers – Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri, and so many more – Kingsolver surfs the wave of an issue she does not understand and does it in an embarrassingly heavy-handed way. There is a whole universe of nuanced, intelligent, profound takes by people who are actually postcolonial subjects themselves. They don’t deserve to have their complicated and mostly very painful history cheapened by some clueless white lady who wants to make an easy buck by painting them as primitive, pathetic creatures.

It gets to the point where the novel informs us that the only really black people are those who are very left-wing. The black people who hold different beliefs are actually whites with black faces. What that means is anybody’s guess but it is quite distasteful to appoint yourself an unsolicited arbiter of who is or isn’t black.

This is not to say that no white person should write about Africa. Kingsolver’s problem isn’t her race. It’s her racism. It’s the philosophy of “all whites are rats and deserve to die because that’s justice while all blacks are victims except for the blacks who aren’t really blacks and are white rats at heart.” I imagine some American 60 years from now writing a novel about the Russian war against Ukraine and painting Ukrainians like Kingsolver paints Africans, and I want to wail.

In Demon Copperhead, which I insist is a masterpiece, the only false note is a depiction of a black character. Kingsolver is clearly one of those middle-class white Americans who are extremely uncomfortable around black people and try to conceal it by doing weird, embarrassing things. At one of the obligatory discussions of anti-racism I attended, a scholar from Africa said, pointing to a stack of woke manuals, “I don’t need all this. I just want people to be normal around me.”

I feel gaslit:

Every other day or so I come across somebody I want to grab, shake and yell, “You are telling me all this? YOU are telling ME?”

People look me straight in the face and earnestly deliver the exact same statements for which they puffed at me like tea kettles two years ago.

Exactly 5 hours after N bought my tickets to Spain, the conference organizers decided to reschedule for 3 weeks earlier. Spain, as we all know, is different.

N takes the management of my travel very seriously. Weeks go into meticulous planning of every detail. How will I get to the airport? How long is the layover? Is there a map of the airport clearly showing where to leave the luggage at the airport if I want to venture into the city during the layover? What transportation can I take? Is there a lounge? How do I access it? Which card should I use at which point of travel?

I felt so guilty, I almost didn’t tell him the conference date was changed. I did, in the end, because I really want to be at that conference.

For the second part of the trip, which almost became the only part, I’m planning to sit on a mountain in San Sebastian and stare at the cold sea.

Poor woman. Now 6,7 million people know that she looked urethral. Whatever that means.

People laugh at my packed car boot. But what can I do if I have to carry enough wardrobe for every 20-degree jump in temperature in either direction we experience throughout the day?

Today, for example, I started out in a fur coat because it was cold even by my standards. Now I’m in a leather jacket. I won’t be home until 6 pm because I’m taking Klara to her art lesson, and by that time we can go all the way to a cotton wrap or more in the direction of a cable-knit sweater. Or who knows, maybe back to the fur coat.

Everybody was looking at me like I was a circus freak when I showed up outside at noon in a fur coat. Like it’s my fault they all slept in and didn’t know it was below freezing when I woke up. Thankfully, the car holds half of my outerwear wardrobe, and I can change.

As a Soviet child, I was forced to worship at the altar of the Communist martyr Patrice Lumumba long and hard. I thought this concluded my penance at the feet of this particular saint but no. I’m now plunged straight back into the Soviet martyrology as I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.

“The native wisdom against Western depravity” trope married to “America as a force of evil” by the power of the favorite Soviet martyr – what’s not to like?

I suffer, so you will suffer with me as I keep posting about this novel.

People on campus are in a state of panic over the SI chatbot that students can use to write essays. This should be a clue to retire the at-home essays for undergraduates. I did it a long time ago because it’s a useless exercise.

Usually, the students write an essay at the end of the course, hand it in, and the course ends. No learning happens. Many professors don’t even read the essays. Those who do and leave detailed comments waste their time because nobody reads those comments. It’s all a massive waste of time.

Instead, I have students write essays in my presence over two weeks. This means six hours of actual writing where I stand over each student and point out the errors as they write. For my Cervantes course, we did it over 3 weeks. Nine hours total. It took us a whole week to write a good first paragraph. And it worked. Not a single student – and these are graduating seniors – had the foggiest idea of how to do it. Years of writing essays, and they never had gotten a chance to find out what professors actually meant by “write an essay.” Only after I spoke to each one individually and guided them did it finally work.

Obviously, this can only happen in small classes. In large lecture courses, you can’t do it. Such courses should forego the essay and do something else.

The AI bot isn’t an enemy. It’s a friend that gives us a chance to rethink one of the outdated, useless staples of education. The essay, the book report, and the “presentation” based on copy-pasted crap from Wikipedia should go away forever. I don’t allow any presentations with text on a screen. Students can show images if they absolutely insist on doing so but words on a screen aren’t allowed. Whatever you want to say can be delivered orally with no visual aides. During a presentation, they speak for 15 or 20 minutes. No reading is allowed. In language courses, this is very useful.

Our lecturers didn’t show a picture of Muhammad but they all still lost their jobs anyway. The story of austerity and how it’s destroying higher education is being hidden behind these manufactured scandals.

Klara has a reading competition at her school. Kids read books from a list and do quizzes on them. Each book is worth between 0.5 and 3 points depending on the length and complexity. The class that reveives 250 points total gets an ice-cream party.

Yesterday I went to the library and brought 11 books for Klara. I left them in her room but this morning I found the whole pile in my study.

“You don’t want to read them?” I asked. “Should I look for different ones?”

“No,” she said. “I already read them. “I’m ready for the quiz.”

We did the quizzes, and she scored 100%.

I’m off to the library for more books. The challenge is supposed to last until June but I have a feeling she’ll earn ice-cream parties for all classrooms well before that.