I’m reading John Gray’s The New Leviathans. Thank you for the recommendation, reader Cliff Arroyo. I’m loving it. I don’t believe I will necessarily agree with everything (because I never do and what would be the point?) but it’s a narcotically pleasant reading. Here’s a quote:

The fall of Soviet communism and the shift to a market economy in China began an era of delusion in the West. Where markets spread, freedom would follow. A new world order would replace the anarchy of sovereign states. This was the theory of globalization, a mix of dubious economic theory with millennial political fantasies.

A stupid, stupid theory that we are paying for through the nose. Russia was allowed to keep its nukes and was feted and coddled because it had “free markets” and “elections.” Now we are seeing that freedom doesn’t come from markets. It comes from people. If people don’t want freedom, nothing can make them try to be free.

I’m 19 pages into the book, and already it’s giving me more food for thought than anything I’ve read in months.

You are in luck, my dear friend. I’m reading a great book on romanticism, and a post on the subject is coming up soon.

As a reader, I’m most heavily into novels. Short stories aren’t easy for me because I usually take a while to get into a text, and with a short story collection, I have to go through this process many times in a row, and it’s tiresome.

Reading plays is an art of itself. Plays are written for performance, not reading, so you have to pay a lot of attention to everything or you won’t get it. I have published a total of one article about a play and nothing at all about short stories. Otherwise, it’s all novels.

I usually do bullet journaling these days. My daughter and I decorate our journals as a favorite shared ritual. It’s like a form of meditation, very relaxing.

But when I’m in a midst of a very busy stretch, like right now, I do revert to productivity planners. This is the one I’m using right now:

It covers 3 months, which is perfect for a short burst of productivity. Right now, I’m teaching more than usual, substituting the lab director who’s on sabbatical, putting in paperwork for a new ASL Minor, writing a book, making endless changes to the Ukrainian book, plus I have 3 articles that were returned with (thankfully, not extensive) changes, writing a new article, and writing a conference talk. This is heavy even by my standards, so meticulous planning is unavoidable. Thanks to my productivity planner, I don’t work in the evenings or on weekends. I also take a day off every couple of weeks just to hang out and do nothing. If you don’t keep work at bay, it will seep over your entire life, and that’s not good.

The seminar on Lorca that I attended had 3 speakers. Two British and one Ukrainian. Two were woke and one was very interesting. I’ll let you guess which were which.

The audience was entirely Ukrainian, and it was a total trip to hear Ukrainians speak Spanish. It never happened to me before.

The talk on Lorca in Ukraine was fascinating. I found out that there was a huge Lorca debate in the country between the translators who turned the poet into a Ukrainian folk artist, simplifying the imagery, changing the meter to the Ukrainian folk song meter, and removing the surrealist, experimental stuff and the opposing group of translators who objected to this approach.

I also discovered that one of my favorite Ukrainian novels from the 1960s was inspired by and references Lorca’s poetry. To my shame, I never noticed it.

Our university has abolished diversity statements in hiring. Not that I ever required them for my department, and policy be damned, but now they are officially gone. Exactly zero people objected.

The tide has turned. Wokeness is dying. Remember, it always begins and ends on campuses.

All of the Ukrainian translators of Lorca (except one who died in a Soviet concentration camp) lived to be almost 100 years old. Some are still living, and they are in their nineties.

I chose a wrong profession.

P.S. I should have mentioned. They were almost all forced to leave Ukraine. So it’s in Canada, Brazil, and the US that they lived so long.

Another problem with being an old mother is that your kid sees the result but not the process. I can show my child a fully realized life but not how I got there. I can show the professional success, the financial comfort, the inner peace, the secure sense of self, the feeling of authority, and a wealth of knowledge. But I can’t demonstrate how to acquire them because I did all that before she was born. She looks at me and thinks that this is how I was from the start, that it just comes naturally and easily to people. And if it doesn’t just happen to her, it’s because she’s not as good.

How do I know all this? She told me. This is a very smart, insightful child.

Don’t wait until you are “ready” to have children. Your readiness is not a gift.

Attendees of one of Moscow’s night clubs were chanting slogans that mock Navalny’s death.

That absolute fool was certain that if he returned to Russia, there would be mass protests and the regime would fall. Now he’s dead, and the people he wanted to save are making fun of him before he’s even been buried.

It’s all Taylor Swift and Katy Perry in our house these days. I’m withering on my stem.

Then, all of a sudden, I hear real music, actual art coming out of Klara’s speaker.

“What is it?” I ask, feeling shaken. “How did you find this?”

“I asked Alexa what her favorite music is, and she said Aretha Franklin,” Klara explains.

The best taste in music in our house belongs to an inanimate object.

I just honestly. These people and their word games. How does it help Navalny to rename something after him? Give Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine and name it whatever you wish. That would be real help. Forgetting Magnitsky in favor of a more recent victim changes nothing.

Why, why do I have to engage with this absolute child, Philippe Lemoine? But OK, I will if people want me to.

Lemoine’s claim #1.

Russia would never attack a NATO country because Russians don’t feel as strongly about, say, the Baltics as they do about Ukraine.

First of all, yes, they feel very strongly about the Baltics. There’s been a single-minded obsession in Russia with how the Baltics are persecuting “ethnic Russians” and oppressing the Russian language. Lemoine doesn’t know this because he’s not part of the cultural space.

But that’s not even the important part. All of the high-minded disquisitions about how it would be irrational for Russia to do this or that are disregarding how much this is not about what’s rational. It’s about love. An irrational, single-minded, painful love.

Russians are in love with America. They were going nuts during Tucker Carlson’s visit. “He went to a store and bought something! He’s walking around in the streets! A real American person! Walking amongst us!” My priest has this level of enthusiasm when he talks about Jesus.

It was the same thing when that Scott Adams fellow visited. Nobody in Russia (or anywhere else) knows who he is but that’s not the point. He’s an American! That’s all that matters. The object of painful, unrequited love finally noticed them.

And what did Putin do during the interview with Tucker? He negged the poor guy. That’s a favorite love trick of the manosphere.

Lemoine goes on and on about how important Ukraine is for Russians and how unimportant the Baltics are. But it’s all a nothing burger because the real love object here is America. All of the Russian invasions are a love letter to America. What is the first thing you do when you fall in love? You start saying, look at me, we have so much in common, I’m the only one who understands you. This is precisely the Russian message. “You invade, and so do I. You are a big, strong country that walks over everybody else, and so am I. We are meant for each other. Why aren’t you seeing this? Why don’t you understand?”

This love is doomed to be frustrated because what does a person in love want from his love object? To have and to hold, at his healthiest. To possess, subsume and own, at his most messed up.

Why is Lemoine not getting any of this and is trying to analyze the situation in terms of “if everybody were exactly like me, then they’d act exactly like I would”? He wasn’t with us when we lived behind the Iron Curtain and invented our own vision of America. He wasn’t with us when the Iron Curtain fell and we discovered a very different America, having to make our peace with that discovery. I often see my 8-year-old trying to reason her way out of concepts she is too young to understand. “The book says rich people live in mansions. We don’t live in a mansion. We must be poor.” It’s cute in an actual child but distressing in adult men like Lemoine.

In order to make pronouncements on what people in another culture would or wouldn’t do, you need to study that culture, immerse yourself in it, and let yourself become aware of the enormous distance between yourself and that culture. We briefly mentioned philosopher John Gray on this blog today. He explained how the Enlightenment-era belief in the hyper-rational core of every human being that supposedly makes us all want the same thing and try to achieve it in identical ways led to many of today’s problems. The French were the leaders of Enlightenment, and no amount of Bataclan fiascos is teaching them anything new.

If Ukraine never existed at all, Russia would be invading somebody. Tantruming, making itself noticed. Ukraine doesn’t solve its problem of wanting to be desired as passionately by America as Russia desires it. That’s a huge problem, and no amount of rationalizing will make it go away.

Hey, you asked for a long posts. Don’t complain now.