Clarissa's Blog

So is it true that Macron is married to an old pedophile or are Russians bulshitting, as usual?

The reason why the genre of “I’m so wounded by this tiny little thing that I’m about to die” is so popular is the same why Hunger Games is a bestseller and many well to do people in this culture enjoy fantasies of an impending apocalypse. This is simply a way for an opulent society to signal its opulence. 

Who is more likely to exclaim in front of others, “Oh God, I have absolutely nothing to wear!”, a rich person with an overflowing wardrobe or a person who lives in poverty and truly has nothing to wear? Who is more likely to say publicly, “I’m so broke!”, a person who just declared personal bankruptcy or a person who didn’t? Who’s more likely to say to her friends, “I’m so fat, I don’t know what to do”, somebody skinny or somebody really fat? Come to think of it, who’s more likely to say, “I’m completely out of ideas and don’t know how I will get anything published”, a person who does or doesn’t have this problem?

Enacting extreme hurt over something trivial is a way of signaling how easy amd great one’s life really is. 

Klara brought me my shoes (that look huge like boats next to her) and repeated “sioux! sioux!” until I put them on. 

Then she brought her shoes and again repeated “sioux! sioux!” (that’s the closest to how she pronounces it)  until I put them on her. 

Then she brought me her jacket and got me to put it on her. 

Then she went to the front door and tugged at it until I opened it and let her out. 

Outside she went to the gate we have around our mimosa tree and shook it until I took off the look she kept pointing at and gave it to her. 

She clutched the lock in her little hand, smiled, and said “Appey.” (Which means “happy.”)

Then she walked around clutching the lock and repeating “appey” for 20 minutes. And then she fell asleep. 

So Putin is up for reelection next year. He has a bunch of fake opponents, created to pretend that Russia is a democracy. You’ve got to playact democracy even if you hate it and go around telling the world how useless it is. 

He also has a real opponent. It’s Navalny, the Russian LePen. And gosh, it’s so funny that Putin, who feeds the LePens of the world, should have his own badgering him at home. If you don’t know who Navalny is, please look up my posts about him using the search function. 

Everything I observe (and I’ll spare you the details) tells me that Putin is seriously worried about Navalny. Why is a total mystery. Navalny is conducting a talented campaign but he can’t get on TV. And if you can’t get on TV in Russia, it means most voters will never hear about you. 

Besides, Putin will, of course, falsify away any percentage of votes that he doesn’t like. This will be accompanied by, “That’s what democracy is like. See, even Americans are investigating if their elections were falsified.” So I see no reason for him to worry. Yet he does. 

You simply don’t cite Sheryl Sandberg and Naomi Klein as intellectual authorities and expect to be taken seriously. You’ve got to show that you are referring to them ironically. Or I begin to feel vicarious shame and curling my toes in embarrassment. 

Benito Perez Galdos is a 19th-century Spanish novelist who’s like Dickens or Balzac but better. And the reason you’ve never heard of him is Spain’s peculiar position vis-a-vis the “real” Europe. But please, please believe me: he is out of this world good.  

Galdos wrote a bunch of amazing (and very long) realist novels, and I read and loved them all. But aside from these novels, Galdos worked on an enormous life-long project of writing historical fiction. The project was called National Episodes, and it’s nation-building at its best. And to think that I had never had time to read any but the very first novel in the project.

There are 46 novels in the project, and the series begins with the battle of Trafalgar and then goes on to cover the entire 1st half of the 19th century, that is, precisely the time when nation-states were being consolidated. 

History is the most ideological of human sciences, and history textbooks are as fictional as any novel. Which is why it makes more sense to use Galdos’s novels to learn about Spain’s history than actual textbooks. 

The Court of Carlos IV is the second novel in the project. It’s not Galdos’s best writing but it’s still so good that I was reading maniacally, on every device in sight, unable to put the book down. The novel shows Spain on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion. It’s full of delightful 19th century gossip but the best part is watching the author manipulating history to suit his nation-building purposes. 

2 novels down, 44 more to go. I’m in paradise. 

Hey, remember those two rich freaks at Yale who made a spectacle out of themselves wailing “You are hurting my fee-fees! You are fucking disgusting! I’m mortally wounded!” at a professor whose wife had written an email about Halloween costumes? 

This is the funniest news ever, so prepare yourselves. Yale responded by throwing the e-mail’s author off campus and giving the rich brats. . . an award! The award goes to “two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.” 

Of course, if you don’t constantly praise every rich little bunny on that campus, the parents might get sore and not endow any more buildings but I wish the consolation prize given to these particular wounded darlings were at least worded differently. 

By the way, the parliament of Catalonia just passed a bill guaranteeing a UBI of about €600 a month to everybody, including illegal immigrants. 

Until now, Spain has had no far-right parties and no anti-immigrant sentiment. Clearly, Catalonia’s law-makers decided to change this.  

And by the way, all of these exclamations about how “nothing can be done, we will all be automated away, the liquid capital has won already” is nothing but a socially acceptable form of capitulating to capital, so to speak. I wish people just honestly said, “I’m doing well and everybody else should go screw themselves” instead. 

Finally, I found something I haven’t been able to get a hold of for decades: garlic scapes. The young farmer at the farmer’s market who was selling them was stunned that I could identify them. They taste amazing in garden salads. I used to pick them at my first husband’s dacha back in Ukraine. I hated that darn place (although it was a beautiful huge house with a real fireplace and a big garden), and the garlic scapes were the only thing to reconcile me with being there.

A big bunch cost me a strange price of one dollar seventy six cents.