Clarissa's Blog

Whenever Klara plays a practical joke on me, I say, “Aren’t you a funny bunny?”

So yesterday she hid my lotion cap and when I started looking for it, she smiled mischievously and said, “Funny bunny!”

It blows my mind that she can already use expressions situationally. Every time it happens, it’s completely unexpected for me. 

Hey, I got an idea. Let’s start a real resistance movement. Not some inane marching for women’s rights alongside Harvey Weinstein and stuff of that nature but real resistance. I propose that we resist Trump’s attempts to colonize our minds. 

Let’s pledge to sit out two thirds of his scandals. That means only learning about and / or reacting to one in three. The remaining two, the moment they begin, turn off, plug out, scroll down, read a book or take a nap instead. Alternatively, you can do two weeks of no Trump drama and then a week back on the dope. 

Of course, some are so hooked, they’d have to go cold-turkey. 

People have been saying Trump is a narcissist. Believe me as somebody who was tortured by a pathological narcissist, the only way to avoid being hurt is withdraw the attention the second a narcissistic meltdown begins. You can actually end up being almost kind of safe around a malignant narcissist but only if you remember to quit the game the second it begins. 

Mike perfectly summarized the Catalonian independence movement:

To me, it seems a modern expression of neoliberal-infused identity politics and consumer “choice” as an expression of those politics.

If things don’t work, go buy a better model. If they really don’t work, buy a better identity. 

I dig conversations with people who think consumerism is a political stance. 

“If people want to XYZ, they should be free to do it!”

“Why?” 

“Because it’s their choice!”

“So?”

“It’s what they chose!!!”

“So?”

“FREEDOM!!!”

So I did buy a second monkey in hopes that it would make my life easier. But not so fast! Klara has figured out that there are now two monkeys and demands that I provide both at any given time. I’m very happy I didn’t buy 3. 

Women on Facebook are running a meme where everybody posts “me, too” if they have been sexually harassed. I can do even better and post “I will be, in three weeks” because I’m traveling to a conference in Santo Domingo and I can predict my sexually harassed future. 

I’m sorry, folks, I’m running around on union business, so I’m short on insight. I just walked into the den of the dragon – a passionate anti-union colleague twice my age – and got him to sign our petition. So I’m super proud of myself. I’ll know I lost my thing when I stop having an effect on grandpas.

I thought that no part of the dumb Harvey Weinstein drama could upset me but I have to confess that it was deeply disappointing to hear about Meryl Streep’s pathetic fawning and simpering at the feet of this stupid tub of lard and her sudden discovery that it’s no longer fashionable publicly to worship him. 

She’s the only person with any talent in the whole story. And she ends up being the most vapid and spineless.

As for campus speakers, the real problem is not that some weirdo came to speak at Berkeley but that the absolute majority of departments in the Humanities have not been able to invite any speakers for years. 

Students don’t even know why. 

“We don’t ever have any speakers at this department!” they exclaim.

“We’d love to invite people,” I say. “But we don’t get funding even for a secretary, let alone for speakers.” 

Students are stunned. They honestly had no idea.

This is what I call class consciousness. We don’t exist even to our own minds. 

So how do you, folks, feel about To Kill a Mockingbird being pulled off high school curricula?

In all honesty, I wouldn’t want to teach any book that contains the n-word in any context or to make any point whatsoever in an 8-grade classroom. I’m not seeing any benefits that would outweigh the discomfort. It’s not even a world literary masterpiece that every cultured person needs to know by the age of 15 or else. It’s an ok book for kids that can be a lot of fun to read but that’s hardly indispensable or exceptionally urgent. 

I remember a class in Ukrainian literature back when I was 14-15. We were reading a novella by a great Ukrainian writer. The problem was that one of the characters used a word that is perfectly innocent in Ukrainian but obscene in Russian. It’s been many years, I’m a literary critic, but all I remember about that author and his novella is the obscenity because that’s how the teenage mind works. 

If I were a teacher and I had a choice, I wouldn’t teach this novel in high school. I wouldn’t teach it in college either but that’s strictly because I personally find it boring and lacking in artistic merit. 

Today’s Kindles are, of course, enormously better than the bulky first-generation ones that cost $400 back in 2008. (It was still before the mainstreaming of smartphones, and these Kindles were miraculous).

One thing, though, I miss enormously from the first-generation Kindle and that’s the automatic page-turn function. One could play with fonts to make it coincide with one’s reading speed. After all the tech advances since then, it would be great to see automatic page-turn regulate itself through learning from your reading patterns. But the only Kindle that even has the page-turn at all is the ultra-expensive waterproof model. As if people were desperate to automatically page-turn under water.