Clarissa's Blog

Facebook is scary. I just discovered a real Spanish fascist on my feed. Real like in he is posting love letters to Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish fascism and, according to this Facebooker, “an innocent victim of red hordes.” 

He asked me to friend him last week and I mistook him for a colleague with a similar name and agreed. But the question is, why did he choose me? I never publish anything in Spanish on FB. I do leave likes under the posts by writer Andres Trapiello. Does this mark me as an FB Spanish fascist? 

A few good, long pieces. 

A great article on feminism. 

A nostalgic piece on diners. 

How the left lost its mind. It’s not just the left, though. It’s everybody. 

And yes, dumb Jews do exist. Unbelievable but true. Here is one. 

I got almost no sleep tonight so I decided to make some borscht to reward myself. I went to the store, bought the ingredients, and sat there staring at them for 15 minutes because I had no idea what I was supposed to do with them.

I forgot about borscht! It’s worse than forgetting my own name (which happens every once in a while.) 

The Indian editor wrote me an email berating me for not responding to his previous message. That he sent on Saturday evening. The due date for the proofs is July 9, so it’s not like I’m behind on anything. Are there no weekends in India, or something? I don’t respond to non-urgent work emails on weekends because I don’t see the need. I have never in my life not honored a deadline or asked for an extension. Never, no matter what was going on in my life. So why the drama?

This would have been a great book. . . back in 1998. In 2012, when it was actually published, it’s quaintly outdated. The bibliography has Homi Bhabha (remember him?) but no Beck, McGuigan or Bauman. The author is convinced that the expression “welfare queen” is still constantly used on the news, Oprah’s book club still operates, and dumpster-diving as political resistance is super fresh. My guess is that it was one of those doctoral dissertations that took over a decade to be published as a book and grew old in the process. 

The introduction and the chapter on Las Vegas architecture were quite good, if not very original. But the chapters on welfare and war were so outdated and superficial that I barely got through them.

Also, this author loves to signpost. In the introduction, she says, “in chapter 3 I will discuss [copy-pasted sentence from ch. 3]”. In chapter 2, she reminds us “in chapter 3 I will discuss [the same copy-pasted sentence from ch. 3]”. When we finally get to chapter 3, she says, “in the first section of this chapter I will discuss [the same goddamn copy-pasted sentence that by now you know by heart]”.

If this is the first book you ever read in neoliberalism, it’s good enough. But if it’s not, do yourself a favor and read McGuigan instead. 

I support “Medicare for all” if it’s allowed to exist alongside the system that is currently in place. So if people – meaning, anybody at all, with no qualifications – want to use state-funded Medicare, they should. And those who want to continue in the current system (meaning me), should be free to do that. 

This is radically different from the sucky Canadian system where you are forced to use the stupid state-owned healthcare. 

I never know if people mean the system I just described or the idiotic Canadian healthcare when they say “single payer.” 

This week we will set aside 3 whole days when we won’t buy anything. This isn’t about saving money but about coming up with ingenious ways to solve problems and do things. I’ve done this before, and it’s quite invigorating to come up with alternative solutions to whipping out the cards. I will take all the cards out of my phone cover for the challenge and uninstall the Amazon app for the 3 challenge days. 

Is, of course, the Left. A section of the NYC Pride condemned the Ukrainian government (the one that defends the rights of gays and recently held Ukraine’s first Pride) and glorified the Russian government (the one that encourages the murder of gays in Chechnya, tolerates the concentration camps for gays and legalized persecution of gays on the entire territory of Russia).

In case you don’t know, the striped orange-brown bow is the symbol of Russian military effort around the world. “The resistance”, of course, refers to the Chechen soldiers who fight Ukrainians in the Donbass. The same ones that have murdered tens of thousands of gays just this year. 

More photos of these little losers can be found here. 

What’s really curious is that serious English-speaking writers have nothing to say about the global transformations we are witnessing. Even Richard Russo is stuck in the 1990s and can move ahead. If one wants to read crisis fiction in English, one has to turn to the authors of unpretentious thrillers like Tana French or Michelle Richmond. 

The Marriage Pact has zero artistic value but it was written by somebody who is very aware of the costs of globalization and whose novel explores the challenges of the liquid world. The novel speaks to the anxieties of successful professionals who know that, in order to preserve their hard-won position of wealth and relevance in the fluid world, they need to shed anything that might tie them down and impede their efforts to imitate ‘the lightning-speed movement of capital.’ 

The only thing that can do that for members of the transnational professional elites is marriage. Marriage is, on the one hand, a marker of a high-class status that is increasingly elusive for anybody who is not succeeding in the new economy, and on the other, an obstacle to constant movement. How can one find a balance between the status that marriage confers and the problems it creates for those who want to remain part of the liquid capital’s elite?

Richmond is worried that the globalization will end up sweeping away marriage because it’s incompatible with the needs of capital. (And this is stated in the novel in pretty much these very terms.) As it is, the only durable links of human connection and interdependence that (at least some) people can rely upon are those of marriage. Take that away, and you’ll see a bunch of solitary, utterly dehumanized fanatics of work who live in lonely luxury and are completely divorced from other human beings. This will complete the dehumanization of the transnational elites, which obviously won’t be good for anybody. 

These are all crucial issues and I’m stunned, just stunned that not a single serious writer in this country is picking up on such a fruitful subject. 

I recommend the novel because it gives food for thought and is devoid of escapism.

So why is there all this tokenism in Wonder Woman? It’s not like the target audience is the SJW crowd. The main character is a dumb infantilized airhead (just like the actress.) Remember that really scary part in the end where she mechanically parrots the meaningless lines the American fellow told her? 

So if it’s not for the SJW crowd, then why is it there?