Clarissa's Blog

Don’t worry, folks. I’m in favor of net neutrality, of course. I just got very annoying and painful food poisoning that spoiled the last day of my vacation, and this made me very crabby. But now I’m back.

Yes for net neutrality!

NO net neutrality means that your service provider (comcast, at&t, verizon, whatever it may be) gets to say “ACTUALLY, it lines our pockets so give us an extra $5.99 for Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, but that doesn’t include Tumblr; that comes with our premium package. That’ll be $5.99 on its own as well. Now about your Google docs and email… 

That sounds fantastic, actually. Any stumbling block on the way to these nasty shits is great. I’m not sure the linked author with the infantile lilt describes it right, but if he does, I’m all for this “no net neutrality.”

There is an interesting discussion about weepers taking place on Facebook:

“In ancient Egyptian culture, mourning rites are associated with public expressions of emotions. These ritualized emotional manifestations concern the participants of the funerary rites as a whole, but even more specifically the feminine group of ‘weepers’. Among this group, some distinctive expressions of affliction can be observed: attitudes of sadness supported by particular words, or noisy and clearly organized demonstrative weeps and screams.”

Volokhine, Youri. « Tristesse rituelle et lamentations funéraires en Egypte ancienne », Revue de l’histoire des religions, vol. volume 225, no. 2, 2008, pp. 163-197.

In my culture (before it was wiped out by industrialization), people invited groups of female weepers into the house to help express grief during bereavement. The more women you could afford to invite to weep, the louder was the noise they made,the more prestigious was the dead person and your family. And it was a good way for older women to make some money and have some financial independence.

I had no idea the custom was as old as ancient Egypt but I think it’s curious to look at the inventive ways women, especially older ones, made a living throughout history.

I try to like Southwest but I can’t. They have the best flights for us but I hate the survival of the fittest approach they promote when they refuse to assign seats. I also hate it that they don’t seat people with small children first (or second, after the disabled). They also make it a lot harder to pre-board online than, say, AA. 

It’s funny but also kind of sad when people try so hard to tear down the underpinnings of the nation-state model while fully expecting the protections and guarantees that only the nation-state gives. 

“Go away, nation-state! You are genocidal and evil! Where did you go, nation-state? Why aren’t you fulfilling your promise to protect me, come what may?”

Consumers believe that the world owes them an unrepayable debt yet routinely forget that they might owe something back. They buy on credit and get mighty angry whenever the bill arrives. 

Masuma Khan isn’t a racist, a politician, or an ungrateful child of immigrants. She’s a consumer. She knows nothing and wants to know nothing but consumerism. But in spite of everything that commercial jingles say, consumerism isn’t bringing the promised bliss. The self that finds nothing bigger than its own desires is a sad and angry self. 

Masuma is angry because she is unwittingly destroying the only thing that stands between her and the scary, indifferent, cold winds of capitalist fate. And she’s doing it to remain faithful to the ideology of consumerism that is giving her nothing whatsoever. I’d be angry, too, if I found myself in such a hopeless trap. 

N and I always loved our vacations. We are good at vacations. And to be honest, I worried what would happen to our vacations once we had a kid. Would it feel like work and not rest? Would it be less fun or less romantic?

Turned out I should not have worried. Vacations are a lot more fun with a kid. This is the best vacation I ever had in my whole life. 

P.S. She doesn’t sleep in the bathroom. We just move the crib there during the day so that it doesn’t get in the way. 

Think that’s good… wait till I tell you about doing scenes in acting class with Marla Maples (terrific person!!) in the late 80s.

It was before Ivana or the press even knew. We rehearsed in her apartment & Donny Boy would call every 20 mins to check up on us.

Ooh, scandal. Erm, what? Where’s sexual harassment here? Maples was obviously in a relationship with Trump since we all know they got married. What is this, the Scarlet A for Adultery era? Why is anybody supposed to care that somebody got divorced back in the 1980s? 

Your Dad is a 5th degree black belt when it comes to sexual impropriety allegations.
In fact… I once had a party at the Plaza Hotel… your father showed up uninvited & hit on my wife… invited her on his helicopter to Atlantic City.

OK, what exactly is “sexually improper” about making advances to a conscious, adult person? And how can one find any moral equivalency between this and groping a sleeping person while filming her? 

It looks like what started as a good and important conversation about sexual assault and harassment is devolving into a prissy fit where people posture as paragons of moral virtue seconds before somebody triumphantly reveals that they, too, had once done something that might be either really evil or vaguely sexual. Nobody seems to care about the difference any more. 

From a hilarious article on a new translation of Homer:

Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language in part to “invite readers to respond more actively with the text,” she writes in a translator’s note. “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”

The rest even funnier. But hey, you do what you got to do to sell the classics to bored, sated consumers. 

The reason why I keep going back to Basque literature is that I’m not done discussing nationalism. It’s something that is truly worth discussing.

What has become of nationalism in the age of consumerism? Nationalism and consumerism were born at the same time but one of them is eating the other alive. Nationalism can’t exist without the belief that there is something bigger than the self. Consumerism can’t tolerate this belief.

Of course, consumerism has no interest in eradicating nationalism altogether. It just wants to empty it of all meaning and leave it on the shelves as one of the endless consumer choices. This is why the language of consumerism (“it’s their choice. Why shouldn’t they have whatever they choose”, etc) is conquering the discussion of nationalist movements.