I took Klara to Olive Garden for the first time today, and she’s in love with their bread sticks. She’s such an American child, it’s funny. Only Americans can be so enthusiastic about these bread sticks. I tried them, and I just don’t get it.

My ASL lecturer, on the other hand, is a dream employee. He wants to start a Deaf Studies program at my department. He told me from the start, “I understand that you are technically my boss. Do you need me to report to you about the steps I take to make Deaf Studies happen?”

I said, absolutely not. Go for it, do whatever you need, I’ll sign everything, just tell me how I can help.

Since then, I keep hearing that he’s constantly in meetings with the Dean, the Provost, the Vice-Chancellor, even the library services. I don’t need to manage the process, hand-hold, or even know about this. In short, the dude is me. He knows what he wants and goes for it. We’ll have our Deaf Studies program in no time.

The ASL lecturer is promising me a course on deaf culture. I’m going to take it as a student because how fascinating?

On my end, I’m bringing Swahili to campus in the Fall. This will be the third new language I’m adding to our department. We hadn’t added any languages for 15 years previously for reasons I don’t understand. My goal is to bring in Hebrew in 2025 so we can offer Hebrew and Arabic in alternate years, and then I’ll happily retire as department Chair.

This is identical to what happened with the administration’s stance on Ukraine. All of a sudden, Biden’s officials are insisting that Ukraine must stop offering resistance and just let Russia bomb indiscriminately. And it all happened at the exact same time. A massive reversal on both Israel and Ukraine.

It’s very sad that political commentary is dead in this country. I’d love to hear an analysis of this. Or, ideally, 3 different explanations from 3 equally interesting pundits. But there’s nothing. All we can get anymore are partisan slogans where people reiterate their party allegiance more eagerly and repetitively than Soviet Komsomol leaders in the Brezhnev era.

Something is happening, and we won’t know why because all people want to do anymore is stand in a dead end, beaming fanatically at a wall.

I’ve spent all day writing an article for this Ukrainian literary outlet that wants to publish my stuff. And it’s so hard to write because everybody on there writes a very sophisticated form of Ukrainian while I barely learned to write the regular kind very recently. I did 2,000 words, and there are exactly 2 fancy sentences in there, which took everything I’ve got.

I’m also being invited to give a talk at the conference of the Ukrainian National Museum of Literature because the organizers think I can elevate their event. I don’t know who they are confusing me with because – and this is no false modesty but simple self-awareness – I can do many things but I can’t elevate anything. Nor do I particularly want to.

I’m very much enjoying all of it but I wish I had spent more time preparing for this new role.

Somebody very smart and kind asked me the following question about Emma Cline’s masterpiece The Guest:

Alex, the main character of The Guest, is a representative of the chthonic chaos that is the enemy of any civilization. Each of us is originally Alex, and our success in life depends completely on how far we manage to travel from our basic self, our inner Alex.

Alex is dumb, primitive desire. She is governed by spontaneously arising whims, and in order to feed them, there’s no destruction she won’t wreak. There was a story on the news recently about a mother who went on vacation, leaving her 16-month-old baby alone. The baby died, but the mother still doesn’t understand why people are upset. She needed a vacation! Don’t you get it? She needed it. This woman is a real-life Alex, and we are horrified by her because we know deep inside that we are all originally her.

When we talk about self-discipline, duty, delayed gratification, and responsibility, we are naming stops on the journey away from our inner Alex. Every society has its bottom layer composed entirely by people who have not found a way to fit their raging desires into a corset of constraining principles. Some societies become overrun by their chthonic bottom, and that’s a terrible thing.

Our society is not like that. But we have a different problem. We keep trying to engineer away the dysfunction of people like Alex. None of the social engineering policies we employ make a dent in the dysfunction. All they do is make life more uncomfortable for the people who are civilized. Cline’s great achievement in the novel is precisely not to provide an explanation for Alex’s dysfunction that would allow us to engage in our favorite pastime of imaginatively engineering away her chaotic nature. “Ah, it’s because she’s poor. Let’s solve poverty. Ah, it’s because she’s a minority. Let’s do DEI. Ah, it’s because she was abused. This won’t happen to me, then. Yay!”

The novel invites us to take measure of our inner Alex and think about what keeps us from sliding into chaos. Take war, for example. Why are there still wars? Why is war a constant accompaniment of humanity? War is an escape valve from the corset of civilization. War is people looking into the face of the chthonic horror that resides inside them. And sometimes realizing that chaos is the default. Civilization isn’t. It’s precious, tenuous, and always at risk.

There’s nothing more useful a person can do than seeing their own reflection in Alex and thinking about what keeps them from being engulfed by the chaos. Also, we need to ask ourselves how much our need to engineer away the chaos in others stems from the fear of not being able fully to contain our own.

I’m not a drug-addled prostitute but I see myself in Alex. No amount of college degrees, publications or accolades contradict that the same chaotic human nature is right there inside both of us. I control mine enormously better but I’d be guilty of the greatest hubris if I were to deny that the chaos is there. It’s always there for individuals and societies, and we need to decide anew to keep it at bay every day.

P.S. If you are a student who needs to write a book report, please don’t copy the above. The teacher will report you as a danger to your classmates if you do. Just use the AI, like everybody else.

Now that we have established that the commonly accepted idea of rights posits them as free-floating entities that pre-exist humanity and are sitting in the ether, waiting for humans to notice and enforce them, let’s talk about where this idea comes from.

The US Declaration of Independence famously says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This is very close to the definition I provided above with one important difference. In the Declaration of Independence, the source of the rights is God. The idea is that God – and it’s very clearly the Christian God who made humans in his likeness – endowed us all with rights just because we exist. It is our job, says the Declaration, to name these rights and then to create institutions that will enforce them.

What happens, though, when we take God out of the equation? Who endows humans with rights then? Who is the Creator? The answer is obvious. It’s humans themselves. It is up to humans to invent rights, choose whom to endow with them, and enforce the endowment.

The only destination of this journey is a war between different factions of Creators who want to impose the rights they invented. And the only criterion to determine which rights should triumph is the amount of force each faction can bring to this debate.

The Declaration of Independence is a beautiful document but it sets us up for all sort of terrible headaches in the exact moment where a very strongly mono-religious society stops being such.

A literature professor (not me) was targeted by a “bias response team” at his college because of – and this is a literal quote – “exclusionary non-verbal facial cues.” Apparently, somebody didn’t like the professor’s face, and it’s gotten so, certain people have the right (khm, khm) not to look at displeasing faces.

How can I remedy this problem? the poor professor asked meekly.

The administrator considered this matter to be extremely serious, prompting his instructions to “work on my face.” When I asked how I ought to perform this labor, he replied, without a hint of irony in his voice: “I recommend spending ten minutes every morning looking at the mirror, working on your facial expressions.”

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/facing-it

The professor in question recently had brain surgery, so he might have an out with the facial cues police. The question remains, though. What if there are people who are wounded, traumatized and dehumanized by the fact that you exist? Shouldn’t they have the right to be spared your genocidal presence?

It looks like we are close to finding out the answer.

Here is the book trailer. I recorded the video before the whole thing was made, which is why my very upbeat affect doesn’t mesh with the rest of the video. But people in Ukraine say it really works for them because it comes off as hopeful. And I don’t want to argue with prospective readers. So here it is:

Also, my outfit is way too playful for what the video ended up being. I’m still into it, though, because I never had a whole book trailer before. Or even a partial book trailer, to be honest.

I can’t watch my own book trailer to the end because the creators put such terrible war imagery in it that I break down two minutes in.

But at least finally somebody understood that my book isn’t that much about Spain or literature at all.