I had no idea it existed, so thank you most kindly for the recommendation.

Now is a strange time to be reading Horowitz’s autobiography because everything he describes about 1968-1975 is happening right now. Unhinged liberals obsessed with a foreign conflict they don’t understand or really care about, occupying campuses and dreaming of “liberated zones” around the country where they would be able to run free. Guilty Jews, lionizing black criminals to expiate their “white skin privilege.” Excusing atrocities overseas by advancing a claim that the US is guilty of worse atrocities.

This is disturbing because it means that the exact same ideas expressed in an almost identical way have dominated the intellectual space in this country for half a century. I didn’t really know how identical it all was. If people were bashing each other’s heads on campuses over “white privilege” 50 years ago and they are doing it now, this is evidence of a complete intellectual stalemate. This is not good news.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the book but I’m only at 37% at the moment. Sincere thanks to whoever recommended. I have the best readers.

It’s a strange moral conundrum to experience at my age. A colleague has been hit on the head and hospitalized after resisting arrest during one of the anti-semitic protests. Normally, I’d send flowers and try to visit. But it’s kind of weird to do that when he’s been hit while engaged in Jew-hatred. It feels clownish, like I’m putting on a show.

My heart bleeds for him. He’s 65 and not in the best of health. A wonderful, sweet, gentle person. With the most outlandishly anti-Semitic ideas (e.g. Jews should all go back to Europe where they belong, etc.).

If only it were somebody that’s easy to dislike. This person isn’t.

Operation “Canadian Literature” continues apace, and I have now added a Francophone novel to my growing list of Canadian masterpieces.

In spite of a clumsy translation into English, it’s  clear from the start that Querelle of Roberval is a product of a different culture than the other Canadian novels I read. I’m sure that this impression would have been even stronger if I read Querelle with the Quebecois slang of the original instead of the prissy language of alarmed middle-aged accountants with which the translator mysteriously endowed its working-class characters. I also intuit that it’s a novel with a significant melodic component where it matters how things sound, and the translation erases that.

Still, even diluted by translation, Querelle is a punch-in-the-gut kind of novel that narrates the slow dying-out and posthumous defilement of the working-class Quebecois culture. Lambert is a talented writer who anticipates every narrative a reader’s mind can compose to weasel out of seeing the truth and unleashes a parody of that narrative at the exact same moment it might arise in the reader’s head. When he does that, it creates a very intimate experience for the reader of grappling with the writer throughout the book. You need high, high skill to write like this.

Unlike many writers who feel guilty for their “privilege” and slobber over industrial workers in embarrassing ways, Lambert wants nothing to do with that kind of virtue -signaling and is brutally honest about the moral catastrophe of his worker characters:

They had found their own way of being. No one wanted them, no business, no bank, no creditor, no insurance company, and suddenly in the midst of their pain and suffering they discovered a gentle, welcoming face, a new start and a destiny. They were not just debris adrift in a filthy, toxic river, they were going to sweep away entire houses. Nothing had any importance anymore, other than to commit evil, to sow it and cultivate it. This afternoon they made a vow to commit themselves to the evangelization of the worst. Of course they would doubtless end up dead or before the courts, but their lives were no longer worth much, certainly not the bother of being defended. They possessed only a small reserve of vitality and would do all they could to expend it on futile and costly causes.

Lambert’s novel has some remarkable similarities with the anti-neoliberal novels in Spanish that I analyze in my new book. The same moral catastrophe of the working classes, the same presence of dead or discarded children, the same absence of solidarity, a female character who destroys children. An article analyzing the similarities between Layla Martínez’s Carcoma and Lambert’s Querelle is begging to be written. Or an edited volume on Quebecois and Spanish literature of anti-neoliberalism. Just bypassing the Anglo world completely. If I didn’t have a trillion other projects, I’d do it.

I have to warn the people who don’t know much about the Quebecois culture is that the book is very NSFW. I was listening to it while resting in the lounge deep in the recesses of my lab. Parts of the book are very hardcore gay porn, and I saw horrified lab workers scatter around in fear whenever I’d proceed to the lounge with my Kindle.

Klara is playing that she’s a turtle and her doll is the turtle’s baby.

“How does the mommy turtle feel about her baby?” I ask.

“She loves her so much that it can’t be said in words,” says Klara. “There are no words in the whole world to express that kind of love.”

After she went to bed, N and I cried together over it. We didn’t know at her age that mothers could feel like that about their babies.

To the reader who published a book: congratulations! If you drop a link here or in anonymous comments, I’d love to read and review it.

It’s not the vocabulary so much – although Dostoyevsky’s word-smithing is, indeed, unique – but the word order. He uses an unusual word order in his sentences that always sounds somewhat off. And that creates the feeling of reality that’s askew in ways that you can’t immediately identify and that does feel ominous. This is impossible to transmit in English with its rigid word order.

In that same time range, marriage rate declined by 11,2%.

This is the pro-Ukrainian Biden we hear so much about. It’s the same Biden who removed Trump’s Nordstream 2 ban, facilitating the Russian invasion of 2022.

At the gas station, an older gentleman came up to me.

“You are very pretty,” he said. “Pretty lady. You work for the university. Back in the sixties, when your university was being built, I was union labor. The university hired non-union, so we went and blew up all the pipes, everything. Now it’s all union on your campus. Never discount union labor.”

I was so touched, I almost cried. I didn’t mention that the current very progressive administration is abusing labor under the slogans of anti-racism. In one of the meetings, when a smug administrator in $600 shoes was bleating about his dedication to “anti-racist work”, the many black union members got up and chanted, “Are we black enough for you? Eleven months without a contract. Shame, shame!” They were accused of being racist, which is a tad confusing given that they were as black as the smug administrator.

Meanwhile in Texas:

The Governor’s Executive Order requires that all higher education institutions in Texas review their free speech policies to establish appropriate punishments for antisemitic rhetoric on college and university campuses, ensure that policies that address the sharp rise of antisemitic acts are enforced, and include the definition of antisemitism in free speech policies.

https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-fights-antisemitic-acts-at-texas-colleges-universities

With Republicans like Abbott, why do we even need Democrats? This is a step in the direction of punishing people for not chanting BLM slogans loudly enough. No speech should be banned or punished. No speech should be equated to action. The moment you start banning any speech, you have created the conditions to have your own speech banned.

That weird feeling when a dear friend of many years is arrested in St Louis for beating up a cop during an anti-Semitic protest.