Clarissa's Blog

Hey, the Bellville shooter seems to have gone to my school. A future Bernie supporter at our university, it’s no wonder he went bonkers. 

Wow, a Bernie supporter from Belleville, IL did a mass shooting in Virginia. Thank you, freakazoid, for guaranteeing we will never hear the end of “Liberal Nazis!” screeching.

This demographic doesn’t care that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t look like a conventional politician (they like it), or about things he did before they were even born. They just want the constant tension that pervades their lives – the tension that comes with having virtually no financial security – to be lifted.

And how exactly is he going to do that? By bringing in more refugees who, by any measure, need more help than 25-year-olds in 2-year unpaid internships? By straining the damaged welfare net even more? By reversing Brexit and thus removing even this sad little defense against fluidity?

How can you save the nation-state certainties by eroding the nation-state?

This is why I’m saying that Corbyn is the British equivalent of Trump. They both exploit the anxiety born of fluidity to rise to power and promote even more fluidity. Forget rhetoric and TV-friendly special effects. Look at the results. 

My former thesis advisor published over 120 book reviews throughout her career. This is very encouraging because I want to get into book reviewing (of academic books, I mean). By the end of this calendar year, I will have 18 published articles and 2 books, so I don’t think anybody will decide that I’m reviewing to pad my CV. I want to do this as a hobby. So I just wrote to review editors of 3 journals offering my reviewing services.

Oh, that inevitable moment when you look at the book that’s about to go into print and realize it’s superficial, clumsy, repetitive, and needs to be tossed in the bin and rewritten from scratch. 

So, in the end, it’s this one. The logo gets in the way but you get the general idea.

Unlike the waterfalls, it isn’t peaceful, and it definitely would have been a letdown to announce something peaceful on the cover and then hit people over the head with liquid capital.

Ikea will be sold on Amazon? Wow, the world will never be the same. 

All day I buggered around with the goshdarn cover images and ended up with nothing but waterfalls. Then my sister came, ridiculed the waterfalls, and found the perfect image in under 1 minute. Literally.

So I read this article about the post-election Hillary Clinton in a strange little magazine called New York. Two things in particular attracted my attention. The first is the tiresome idea that everybody who says that it’s time for Hillary to leave public life is a sexist. One would think that the results of the last election would teach people not to substitute analysis with the chant of “racist and sexist.” 

Another thing is that Huma Abedin is still hovering all over Clinton. Which, to me, is mind-boggling. 

The whole article left a nasty aftertaste. 

But I also read a very good piece in the same magazine which suggests that the most promising strategy Democrats could use right now is to pedal the healthcare issue and talk about the horrible AHCA. I believe it’s true that this issue is a winner together with the words “a tax cut for the ultra rich.” This will sound like a very tiny thing, but I tried this line on the neighbor who’s a Trump supporter and it had an effect.