Clarissa's Blog

I’m in the wrong profession, folks. I should have been an index-maker. My brain is set up in a way that makes this kind of work extremely easy.

Of course, I would die of boredom and lack of challenge within a month, so nothing is perfect.

Why are both Obama and Trump so subservient to the Saudis? Ten years ago, OK, there was no choice. The Saudis held the control over the world economy in their pockets because theu could manipulate oil prices. But there’s been a fracking revolution in the US. Things have changed but the US presidents act as though it never happened. 

When will the Saudi rule over the US finally end? The Saudis are very distasteful. I’m tired of seeing American presidents grovel at their feet when our culture is clearly superior to theirs. 

What you need to know about Herman Koch’s The Dinner is that the novel rests on the idea that violence is a disease that is transmitted genetically. Unfortunately, it isn’t revealed until you’ve read 70% of the book that you’ve got to buy into this ridiculous claptrap for the novel to make sense. 

I feel offended by this kind of writing because it’s a waste of time for the people who don’t share this degenerate ideology. 

This is turning out to be a weird reading year for me. Everything I read is either irredeemably bad or extraordinarily good with nothing in the middle. 

. . . has been solved! Remember how I shared that Klara kept saying the word “Vova”, which confused us because we don’t know anybody by this name (it’s the diminutive of Vladimir), and we only refer to Putin by his last name. 

Whenever I asked Klara to show me Vova, she would point at N, which really weirded me out. Is N a secret Putinoid, I wondered, and did Klara find this out about him? Is she trying to warn me?

This was one of her favorite words that she repeated all the time, and I had no idea what it meant. 

But now the mystery has been solved. It turns out that Vova is Klara’s way of pronouncing “yozhik” (which means “hedgehog” in Russian).

What a relief!

Have you noticed that it’s never normal students who shut down classes and wail idiotically at guest speakers but always rich spoiled brats? 

Has anybody tried assigning them homework to keep them occupied? Or would that make tyem feel too threatened and unsafe?

AT&T workers from the store around the corner are striking. I read a newspaper account about the strike and discovered that the company’s spokespeople claim that the strikers are making $140,000 and their discontent makes no sense. 

I don’t know how much workers elsewhere make but I know for an absolute fact that the people who are striking here in town don’t even make $40,000, let alone $140,000. I know that because I know one of the strikers and her friend and the Mom of another strikers. And I know them enough for them to have shared information about their working conditions with me long before the strike. 

One of the benefits for the capital of fluidity and the attendant rootlessness is that people never manage to form deep enough relationships that will allow them to share the truth about their working conditions . 

Somebody on my Facebook posted it and I had to steal it. Sorry! I really am but I love it and I can’t believe an actual American actually recognizes this. 

America’s embrace of cultural and intellectual egalitarianism has been a mistake. 

I believe that the real purpose this cloying, fake egalitarianism serves is to conceal the inequality in the class relations. 

Once again, I apologize for stealing the quote. 

I don’t like novelistic version of The Handmaid’s Tale all that much but I’m hoping that the series will at least push some people towards realizing that surrogate motherhood is a horrible practice. And it’s working, it seems. I have seen two articles today (in Spanish and in Ukrainian) whose authors have been forced to consider the emotional trauma of this inhuman process by the series. 

So I hope people keep watching.

Turns out I use the word “culmination” a lot.

It’s very useful to do an index of one’s book because one discovers a lot of not necessarily wonderful things about one’s writing style.

Back in 2012, Russian dissidents were triumphantly sending out a photo that disproved the famous narrative of “It doesn’t mean anything that Putin worked for the KGB. He never persecuted anybody, he was just a spy.” In the photo, Putin was conducting an arrest (accompanied by a beating) of an anti-Soviet intellectual. 

And it was so gosh darn frustrating. Because it was like, now you’ve discovered he is a villain? It’s 20-fucking-12! 

Cue 10 years from now when a bunch of folks will start eagerly informing us that guess what? Trump wasn’t really perfect, after all.