Clarissa's Blog

So preschool is before kindergarten?? And it starts at three?????

This is so wackadoodle.

Today I feel like the whole world is just messing with me.

Every Tuesday I rush like crazy to get home after my 3 long and very different classes, make a hot meal for Klara, bring it with me to daycare and feed it to her on our way to the dance lesson. The meals are all made from scratch, balanced, healthy and multi-component.

And then I arrive and discover that another kid had a birthday and a [deleted profanity] well-meaning [deleted profanity] parent [deleted profanity] brought [deleted profanity] a tray of cupcakes [deleted profanity] in poisonous colors. And now not only does Klara have no interest in the hot meal, but she’s listless and I’m afraid she’ll throw up just like last time.

[deleted profanity] cupcakes from here to [deleted profanity].

[deleted profanity][deleted profanity][deleted profanity]

Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, which owns Doritos, said her company is making a less crunchy version of Doritos because “woman don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth,” at least not in public.

It’s good I’m never going to be allowed to eat Doritos again for health reasons because I always thought the whole point of eating them was the licking and the pouring.

Klara grabs the remote, presses some buttons, and speaks into it as if it were a phone.

“Papa? Papa, where are you? Come back! I miss my papa!”

I feel a pang of guilt even though it’s not like I deprived her of papa. He’s at the gym.

OK, so am I supposed to write thank-you emails to people who review my books? I never did but I started receiving such emails from people whose books I’ve reviewed? Am I being very rude, as usual?

The Expulsion of the Other is the first book I have read by the German-Korean philosopher who is one of the best popularizers of Zygmunt Bauman’s thought today. There is nothing beyond what Bauman already said here but Byung-Chul Han writes a lot more simply and accessibly. He also has an interest in literary criticism that Bauman lacked.

The book’s title makes it impossible for the author to avoid the subject of immigration. Byung-Chul Han lives in Germany, so obviously the issue is a red-hot burning one. The problem is that if you want to be part of intellectual life, you either keep strictly silent on the issue or take the position that “nobody has more right to live anywhere than anybody else.” The latter is the pronouncement that Byung-Chul Han makes but he does it with such obvious boredom and listlessness that it becomes clear this is nothing but an empty formula of compliance.

What really interests Han is the elimination of even the possibility of an actual engagement with the Other from our lives. The worship of diversity is actually completely counterproductive to it:

Diversity only permits differences that conform to the system; it constitutes an otherness that has been made consumable.

The consumerist terror of conflict and unpleasantness is depriving us of anything that even remotely looks like stability and causes deep anxiety:

It is only from conflicts that stable relationships and identities ensue. A person grows and matures by working through conflict.

This requires time, however, and that is contrary to the neoliberal value of increasing productivity. So people opt for

the fast relief of tension that is handed over to chemical processes. . . Antidepressants suppress states of conflict and quickly restore the depressive performance subject to a functioning state.

As I said, there is nothing particularly new here for those who have read Bauman. But Byung-Chul Han has some really good turns of phrase that are useful:

We constantly send messages on Twitter. But they are not directed at a concrete person. They mean no one. Social media do not foster a culture of discussion. They are often affect-driven. Shitstorms are an undirected flood of affects that does not form any public discourse.

Bauman, of course, had taken this idea even further and explored how the very possibility of a participatory political process was destroyed by the fake spectacle of politics that played out on social media.

All in all, I liked Byung-Chul Han and I will keep reading his work, if only because Bauman is no longer with us, and I miss his insight.

Every year, we get emails asking people to volunteer to host high school students from underdeveloped countries who come to stay for a year because they won a scholarship. The hosts don’t get paid anything to do it. And every year the program finds enough hosts. I’m awed that there are people who want to undertake such a duty just to be kind. I wish I had it in me but I don’t. But I deeply admire those who do.

What kind of an outlandishly dumb idiot eats food containing butter and eggs while being on antibiotics for a gallbladder inflammation?

Yes, that would be me. And no, it wasn’t pretty.

A fellow on the news is promising that the Nunes memo will have an impact on the next elections.

These clowns are certifiable.

Did you, folks, see what women in Iran are doing? The feminist protests? That’s what real feminism is about, and it’s so beautiful and inspiring to see the photos of women from the protests.

I hope that the courage and the dignity of Iranian women will inspire people around here to remember what feminism is supposed to be about. And maybe they will finally realize that publishing stories about how “I became his girlfriend because I thought he’d help my career but he didn’t, so I now realize he harassed me*” is not about feminism.

* This is from the Concordia scandal.