Our Dean lost his secretary and won’t be allowed to hire a new one. I was the only person who felt compassion towards him over it. I think I might have even posted about it here.
My compassion brought typically neoliberal results. The Dean decided to take my secretary away. There are 50 others to choose from but he homed in on mine.
I never voiced my compassion to him. This works on a different plane than any direct tit-for-tat. But compassionate suckers who leak emotions invariably get punished. It’s how the system works.
Clive James, a wonderful literary critic and a polyglot, has excellent suggestions for you, my friend.
Read Borges.
His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least.
2. It’s best to choose essays as your first serious reading matter in the language.
Memo to any student making a raid on the culture of another language: essays are always the easiest way in.
3. Here’s the actual method:
Read an essay a day, underline every word you don’t know, keep going for as long as you get the sense, look up the hard words afterwards.
If you aren’t ready to tackle actual essays, there are collections of very simple stories you can get on Kindle. Get one and start from the most basic story, using the method outlined above. You learn to speak by speaking and to read by reading. If you goal is to read in a language, then read a bit every day.
And one more quote from James because it’s very beautiful:
When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naive. But it was when we were still naive that we knew most intimately the lust of discovery, a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never had to fear rejection.
Art will always want us. It finds us infinitely desirable.
Muchísima suerte y que lo pases bien en el proceso, compañero.
By the way, I forgot the name of the protagonist in Roses for Credit and asked AI. I wanted to see if it could do this task. AI told me the character’s name is Marilou, which it most certainly isn’t.
In questions relating to literature (which is 90%) of questions I ask AI, about half of responses I get is absolute crap. Mind you, I don’t ask AI to analyze works of literature. I only ask for straightforward facts. How many siblings does character such-and-such have and what are their names? When do the events in the novel take place?
The reason why I ask these questions is, for the most part, to be prepared for the weird things students will tell me about these texts in class.
Has anybody read Roses for credit (Roses à crédit in the original) by Elsa Triolet?
Triolet was Lilya Brik’s younger sister. And Brik was the famous mistress of the Russian poet Mayakovsky. Triolet emigrated to France right after the Russian revolution. But once a commie, always a commie. She married Louis Aragon and converted him to Communism.
In any case, she wasn’t a bad writer. I read her novel Roses à crédit when I was maybe 14, and it impressed me deeply. The main character, Martine, grows up amidst the grime and ugliness of extreme poverty. She wants things to be beautiful around her. And clean. Beautiful, straight lines. Everything clean and modern looking. She marries into the middle class and starts buying tons of furniture and appliances on credit, and then the novel starts the Communist indoctrination on how not wanting to live in misery and be surrounded by excrement will lead you to being eaten by rats. Which, I know, crazy. But the novel wouldn’t have been published in the USSR without that degree of cuckoo propaganda.
Roses à crédit did not make on me the effect desired by the Soviet apparatchiks. I really identified with Martine and rooted for her. Not with the stuff that entailed buying on credit. I have zero credit card debt, by the way. But I hate the grime and the ugliness amidst which I grew up.
Are there any other Martine fans here, by any chance? She’s like a French La de Bringas, a century later.
It’s not enough for Elon Musk that he messed up his son so badly that the boy now poses as a girl, he now has a plan to make many more young people similarly inclined:
Anime porn is a #1 road that takes young men to “gender fluidity” and beyond. And by the way, all those dudes in very masculine jobs who declare, at the age of 56, that they are now called Jessica also almost always get there by way of this kind of pornography.
This stuff confuses parents and wives who think it’s an innocent, cartoon-type thing, but there’s really perverted shit happening in this genre. There’s a similar hormonal upheaval happening at 15 and 55, and people who are already not quite themselves can start glitching big time with this material.
Not to worry. Democrats are proposing yet another immigration amnesty bill. We all know how much Americans want migrant caravans to come back. This is sure to bring those ratings right back up.
Wild Strawberries is a charming British novel from the 1930s. This is the first book by Thirkell I’ve read, and it looks like she was inspired by Anthony Trollope to write a series that would continue his Barsetshire novels. Thirkell isn’t really Trollope, of course. She’s much lighter, and Wild Strawberries is sweet and lovely but it’s not a work of art. It’s exceptionally high-quality amusement. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
What Thirkell does share with Trollope is that her writing is a lot less about plot than characters. She creates some absolutely delightful characters, and they make her books worth reading. In Wild Strawberries, for instance, there’s Agnes, a mother of three, who is so blissfully happy being married and having kids, that it’s a joy to read about her. It almost never happens in literature that you meet a female character who is fine. Just simply fine. She’s not unhappy, resentful, oppressed, of covetous. Agnes loves everything about her life. And it really makes you sit up and notice when you realize that you can’t think of another female character who is so content with life. There are tons of male characters who dig their lives but no female ones.
Then there’s Lady Emily, Agnes’s mother. She’s hilariously fussy and exceptionally delightful. There’s also Martin, a teenage boy, who’s living his boyhood with great enjoyment. The whole novel is just so gosh darn enjoyable. If you need some peace and lightness in your life, do read it. It’s outstanding.
This is very disappointing. I want to keep supporting Israel but it’s getting hard. It doesn’t seem like anything will be enough for Israel to stop going to war.
I’ve been extremely supportive but it’s getting so I’m starting to wonder if Russia is not the only culture of death on the planet.
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