Clarissa's Blog

A waiter brought me an amuse-bouche and I felt bad about keeping my elbows on the table. 

Evicted is one strange book. The writer claims to be a sociologist who spent months with people suffering the effects of evictions and wrote an account that sounds fictionalized but he claims is literally true. I find it impossible to believe his claim, though. The characters he describes illustrate so neatly every single stereotype about people on welfare that it’s suspicious. They are:

1. A homeless woman on welfare who buys $200 face creams and eats lobster and steak on her food stamps. At least, she doesn’t arrive in  a Royce to pick up her lobster, so thank God for that very small mercy. 

2. A white ex-felon who makes his black stepdaughters chant “White power!”

3. A black woman who keeps having insane numbers of fatherless children, abandoning them, having more, etc. Of course, the children grow up to become crack dealers. 

4. A family of black women who celebrate a bizillionth teenage pregnancy and try to chase away a responsible, hard-working father because they don’t want to lose the pregnant kid’s welfare check.

5. Irresponsible black parents who let their baby burn to death while they party.

6. A white male nurse who pisses away a great job and a high salary on an opioid addiction. 

All of these characters live in extreme filth, pour kitchen grease down bathtubs, leave rotting food on takeout plates lying around, and pummel at each other at every opportunity. 

All white characters hate black people. All black people hate black people, too. I wonder to what extent the anti-black statements by black people were made because that’s what they thought the white Harvard prof wanted to hear but Desmond apparently doesn’t understand that utterances might be influenced by the audience.

Desmond doesn’t judge his characters. To the contrary, he tries to explain how their behavior isn’t a cause but is caused by their poverty. But I can’t get over how conveniently his characters illustrate every stereotype that he sets out to debunk. The result is poverty porn with very little value aside from confirming stereotypes.

The book’s structure is weird, too. There are copious endnotes many of which contain extremely important and relevant information on poverty and homelessness. But it’s beyond annoying to have to dig through the book to find them. The useful endnotes are hidden among truly crazy ones. For instance, one of the stories of today’s homelessness in Milwaukee links to an article about hospital patients in Argentina with no explanation what Argentina has to do with any of it. Another endnote references an article from 1961, again with no explanation how it might be relevant. 

The author also loves to fill his endnotes with pompous declarations of the painfully obvious in the spirit of “Hunger can be very unpleasant for human beings. It can cause short and long-term negative effects.”

The conclusion to the book is that Azerbaijan and Zambia are more progressive than the US and have better social services. Those lucky Zambians! I wonder why they offer no foreign aid to the pathetic, miserable Americans. 

Let me end the review with the book’s closing words:

No moral code or ethical principle , no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

Fivethirtyeight’s analysis of a Surveymonkey data-set shows that Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election if registered Democrats had turned out and voted in larger numbers — in other words, Hillary’s failure to convince registered Democrats to vote, rather than abstain, lost her the election.

This is why I’m indifferent to the current hoopla over Russians owning the Wikileaks. This is so much bigger than the Wikileaks. Over the years, I’ve seen crowds of Liberal journalists, bloggers and Facebook acquaintances lap up and eagerly promote every lie fed to them by Russian propagandists. They did that in good faith because they are still in the Cold War mode of “If evil conservatives say the USSR is bad, it must be good.”

From “Nazis in Ukraine” they seamlessly moved to “Hillary is boring, she is unexciting, it’s business as usual, eeencrementalism, I just can’t get excited about her.” As if they were asked to masturbate to her campaign photo instead of voting. Many of them are still repeating the same shit interspersed with the same old Nazis in Ukraine. 

Assange on his own would have done nothing. There was an enormous number of sincere Liberals who helped out of intellectual inertia and lack of psychological agility. 

I love this MLA. Not only because I chose the best sessions to attend but also because people are intelligent. I get asked the best questions about Klara, like “What is her personality like?” She has a fascinating personality but all I usually get asked is if she sleeps through the night (yes) and if she has teeth (yes.)

It’s snowing in Philadelphia, so I decided to look Russian. 

After the two movies with the blond fellow, I caught the second part of the film Joy with Jennifer Lawrence. It’s incredible how horrible this movie is, and not only because of the egregiously untalented Lawrence. Everything is so fake and ridiculous that it’s impossible to believe this was based on a true story.

Well, at least it’s not a good movie that Lawrence slaughtered. I still can’t get over how the horrible Natalie Portman slaughtered I Black Swan. That movie had everything to be an actual work of art until that robot crapped all over it. 

Oh God, I’m really tired. As I was watching the movie I wondered where I could have possibly seen the leading actor who looked vaguely familiar. So I Googled him and discovered that he was the male lead in another movie I watched immediately before this one. After staring at this guy for 2 hours, I didn’t recognize him. 

In my defense, I have to mention that he’s blond, and I always tended to blot out blond guys.

I’m so tired that I watched the movie I Love You, Man from start to finish and I cried. Because it was touching. 

I listened to a Stanford professor of French literature go on and on about the amazingness of digital Humanities and I wondered at how oblivious he can afford to be to what this ridiculous concept really is about. 

The goal of digital Humanities is to rob scholars of literature of any residual independence from capital that we still enjoy. To do my research, all I need is a book, a pen, and a notepad. Google is helpful, too. But I don’t need grants, I don’t need to compete for funding, I don’t need any institutional support, I don’t need to beg capital to fund my existence. It’s good to have grants, funding and support but they are not necessary. 

Once we allow ourselves to be trapped in the belief that we are nothing without databases, JSTOR, NEH, Project Muse, and all these expensive devices of exclusion, we lose our freedom from chasing money. We are letting ourselves be convinced that a scholar who works without all this – and I repeat, expensive – shit is somehow deficient. My university can’t even afford Project Muse anymore, so I guess that excludes all of us who work there from creating great research accessible to rich folks from Stanford.

And do you know what profound conclusions the Stanford fellow managed to draw on the basis of his tables, graphs and the rest of the digital crap? That the concept of human rights was invented in the 18th century. Gosh, at this pace, he will soon discover the shocking news that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Right now, I can shut up any administrator who points out that I don’t “bring in any external funding” with a dismissive “I don’t need any funding.” It’s true and it feels damn good to be able to do that. But once we are forced to defend ourselves as digital humanists, that’s it for this kind of freedom. We’ll enter the dumb rat race for the funding that we don’t even need.

Reject the tyranny of capital! Reject digital Humanities! Occupy literature. 

Since my book is about to be published, I need a new project. I’m walking around the MLA exhibit, looking at book titles, and making note of which words in them attract me. For now it looks like the word “citizenship” draws me in a lot.

Of course, I never know where my project will take me. The current book was supposed to be about the Spanish Civil War but it turned into Spain’s Engagement with Liquid Capital. 

I love being at the start of a new project. It’s like I’m about to start unwrapping an amazing gift. The project I just finished brought me an understanding of the erosion of the nation-state, the liquid economy, and the fascinating stuff we’ve been discussing on this blog for the past 3 years. 

This will be fun!