There is a point in Beatriz Serrano’s novel Unhappiness when its protagonist Marisa goes to a museum and admires a painting. One gets so tired of Marisa’s incapacity to care about anything that it’s a heartening moment when she tries to enjoy a work of art. However, the reader’s hopes that there’s some substance to Marisa’s otherwise vacuous personality are dashed when she explains what she likes about it.

The painting Marisa admires is Hieronimus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”:

She has no use for the first and the third parts of the triptych because a religious message bores her. Instead, Marisa concentrates on the central panel that represents her idea of what the world should be like. Lots of sex in the most bizarre permutations and absolutely no other activity whatsoever! What’s not to like? Interestingly, Marisa herself is not very sexual. Her sensuality is almost entirely limited to food. Plus, she’s on heavy tranquilizers that don’t lead to great libidos. This is not the case of a very sexual woman beaten down by a repressive society. Marisa’s situation is the exact opposite: she’s almost entirely unsexed in the world of extreme sexual permissiveness.

Marisa’s explanation for why she believes that the central panel of the triptych would represent the world at its best is, as always, a meaningless slogan. “Such a world would be diverse and friendly [diverso y amable]” she says, oblivious to how much of an oxymoron this is. Diverse means heavily and often irreconcilably conflicted, grating, uneasy. Marisa is too sociophobic to have a normal conversation with anybody who’s identical to her in culture, language and upbringing. In a diverse environment, she’d be even more lost.

The core of Marisa’s personality is at full view in this scene. She was told she must be in favor of sex-centered lifestyles and diversity. And even though she has absolutely no use for either and actually couldn’t tolerate them, age will cheer for them mindlessly and aggressively. The mystery of women who advocate for the destruction of women’s sports or depolicing is solved! They are all Marisa.

And that’s quite scary.

Spain won’t stop cramming its propaganda down our gullers even at the airport:

I wouldn’t have noticed if the bloody rainbow hadn’t been thrust at us in every public space for two weeks.

I’m starting to suspect that the whole “Pride month” thing is a conspiracy by a group of rabid homophobes.

Leaving Spain tomorrow.

I’ll deeply miss:

– beautiful views

– slow mornings and intense evenings

– walking 10+ km each day

– absence of terrible heat. Normal human summer weather and not the atrocious 8-month-long heatwave where I live

– carrots that taste as they should and not as if they were a relative of plastic

– sweet cherries at €2.30 a kilo. Not a pound. A kilo! It’s $5.99 a pound where I live.

– real ice-cream

– good coffee

– low prices

– sociable people

– books I want to buy

– no insects

– stylish old ladies

– architecture

– indescribably beautiful manicures for €14

– anchovies that are not only edible but actually enjoyable

– ease of buying very comfortable footwear that doesn’t make one look like an elderly duck

I will not miss:

– the perennial “our kitchen is closed and won’t open until 8 pm”

– everything reeking of smoke

– high salt intake

– scarcity of public toilets

– the suspicion that somebody vomited rainbow and Palestinian flags everywhere

– unattainability of eggs cooked overeasy. Or any eggs that aren’t scrambled into cardboard state or poured into scary “potato tortillas”

– shelf milk. I did try it and Lord have mercy

– absence of kids’ menus

– inability to straighten my hair and having to go everywhere with an out-of-control Jewfro

– laundry problems

– sadness and emptiness of malls

– ugly windmills destroying the landscape

– inability to buy a book for Klara

– terrible salads that seem utterly unconnected to the amazing produce

– old men walking around holding hands with very young black boys

– extremely emotional cab drivers

– no Uber except in Madrid

– no Ukrainian flags anywhere

– terrible little Chinese stores on every corner

– being deprived of soup

The reason why the presidential election looks geriatric and disappointing is that we are trying to convince ourselves to let go of the nation-state. We are all collectively putting on this embarrassing spectacle to make the loss not only palatable but desired.

This is why there are no younger, fresher candidates. This is why voting feels useless. Together, as a group of 320 million, we want national politics to be farcical. We really, really want it because we need an excuse to throw away the nation-state. The very first, the most successful, the most impressive nation-state in history has chosen to be the first in pulling itself apart.

Never forget they told us he got 81 million votes. Most popular candidate in HISTORY, by a large margin.

2020 was a STOLEN, FRAUDULENT election.

And everyone knows it.

— Thomas Jefferson (@BasedDetails) June 28, 2024

Both comments are phenomenally dumb but the “81 million votes” is the absolute winner. I’ve heard actual, real people (with fancy PhDs, may I add) repeat it with happy, zombified faces for years.

Obviously, Biden’s high vote count is owed, in large part, to how many people detested Trump and voted not so much for Biden as against Trump. Many of these 81 million are not passionate Bidenites but passionate anti-Trumpists. Is it a huge surprise that passionate anti-Trumpists exist? Have we not gotten enough opportunities to hear from them that we need to be so virginally surprised at their capacity to win elections?

The exact same people who can’t go a day without mentioning Trump Derangement Syndrome can’t fathom the possibility that this condition drove voter enthusiasm for an otherwise uninteresting Biden.

This is a huge pet peeve because I have two very dear friends who keep advancing this poster’s exact talking point and I just can’t already.

A gentle reminder to Democrats: you believe that women have penises, so there’s no intellectual advantage you can claim here. Humility is always in order until you can say publicly “women never have penises and men cannot give birth.” Whatever lunacy the Trump crowd advances, it has not remotely reached yours.

I didn’t watch the debate live because of the time difference. How did it go? I don’t know when I’ll have time to watch but what are everybody’s initial impressions?

I’m kind of depressed after spending time at this conference and talking to colleagues from many different colleges in the US and Canada. Everybody has horror stories about language programs being shut down, tenure lines eliminated, colleagues pushed into early retirement or outright fired. People have to teach courses they aren’t remotely qualified to teach (like me and my Molière course that starts on Monday).

The colleagues are all wonderful people, and they are trying to put a brave face on it but it’s all so sad. We all came to thriving programs and are witnessing their agony and demise. We had a great thing going with truly the best higher education system on the planet, and we’ve pissed it all away. Yippee for bloody us.

This is the Plaza Mayor of San Sebastián:

If you look closely, you’ll see that there are numbers over each balcony door:

Here they are:

These are not apartment numbers. But what are they? How were these numbers used historically?

At the conference banquet, I was out of luck. The entree featured delicate white fish with a large pickled tomato as garnish. I’m a lifelong fan of pickled tomatoes but they should not share a plate with white fish. They are pungent, overpowering. The fish gets completely lost by their side. Plus, nobody can eat a pickled tomato correctly in polite company. People went at the tomatoes with fork and knife, which immediately got the juice to burst out and soak the fish.

People truly take culinary experimentation too far. If you have a good, fresh piece of fish, all you need to do is not mess with it too much, and everybody will be happy.

This lady just picked her husband up from the airport, kissed him and immediately went to the passenger seat lmao

— 808s & Backaches (@Craig__b) June 24, 2024

That’s exactly what I do. I don’t get why it’s funny.

It’s interesting that one can behave in a way that’s completely normal to one yet to other people it looks weird. Speaking of which, Klara and I came up with the following joke after observing a small crowd of completely naked elderly people on the beach in San Sebastián:

“Hey, body parts! Whatcha doing?”

“Oh, just hanging out.”