Clarissa's Blog

It turns out that the formidable and acidly cruel in his writings H. L. Mencken was an incredibly kind, generous, patient, gentle and loyal person in RL. And a phenomenal friend. 

There truly is an enormous distance between a writer and a text. 

What I always wonder when I read writers’ biographies is how they managed to write anything with the insane number of people they all were constantly meeting. Not only would I have taken my own life with one hundredth of all that socialization but I would have never written a word. Even just reading about all those meetings with all those people freaks me out. 

I’m so glad I’m not the person to do the editing on my book. This kind of work makes me go all confused in the head. I spent a lot of time one-spacing all the long quotes when they were supposed to be double-spaced. It’s just not something I should be doing.

I have a funny brain. People install apps that lock down their computer and prevent them from accessing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other distractors while they work. I, on the other hand, can only work in the mode of 

“As borders grow increasingly porous to the flows of capital and the migratory currents that accompany the unconstrained – ah, wait! let me Google that turkey brine recipe – a new blog comment, let’s see – by the way, what is the English for “despotricar” – ha ha, that’s a funny show I’m watching on etvnet – to the flows of capital and the migratory currents. . .”

And that’s how I produce huge quantities of text. Put me in front of a screen with no distractions, and I’ll never write anything. I have very intense and fascinating thoughts and if I don’t drown them out with all these media, I won’t be able to write.

The reason that identity politics fails so badly is because people know that discrimination today is all about access to resources. Anti-racist and anti-sexist rhetoric is empty and meaningless if it’s not accompanied by a clear plan insuring a more equal access to resources. The anti-women reality is not that somebody says I’m fat or interrupts me but that access to abortion is problem-free for those who have money and very hard for those who don’t. Free healthcare and lack of workplace discrimination would do more for LGBT rights than years of observing the toilet circus on TV.

Identity politics is toothless because it doesn’t threaten anybody’s financial interests. All of these toilets, mansplainings and Co are distraction tactics that make us feel vindicated while we are being robbed.

Ah, folks, did you see the Trump / Putin nuclear weapons comments? Trump didn’t lose any time in trying to remove sanctions on Russia. We will soon hear that removing the sanctions and recognizing the Crimea as Russian is the only way to prevent a nuclear war and Trump saved us all from a nuclear catastrophe by removing sanctions. 

“Let me scare you with nukes into complete compliance ” is a strategy that Putin has used so often that it’s boring. 

When I indulge in my secret hobby of reading writer biographies, I prefer the ones written before 1980. Ideally, long before 1980. 

The older generation of biographers allowed the story to take them wherever it would. These days, the author comes up with a theory or an organizing principle of the subject’s life and then massages the story to fit the theory. This is especially bad in autobiographies where every event becomes “one more step on the way to my enormous success.” And that sucks because human lives don’t have an organizing principle. We can attach narratives to them a posteriori but that’s always fake. 

Another problem with recent biographies is the blasted Internet. Research has become so darn easy that biographers can’t resist the temptation to list every casual acquaintance of the subject and every word that ever passed the subject’s lips. An example of this strategy is this biography of Maugham whose review got me persecuted for years by a bunch of the author’s faithful fans. 

This is why I only buy my biographies in old and musty used book stores. 

And see what I just found:

HB2 is, of course, the toilet bill. The ACLU considers the incapacity to use the toilet it strikes one’s fancy on any particular day to use “disaster & shame.” But the incapacity of a little girl with Down Syndrome to get medical care her public employee parents paid for is not a big deal at all. Denying care to cancer patients is not hate and fear-mongering but a limitation on where you can and can’t shit is. 

I have to conclude that the ACLU has completely sold out to big business. 

Fuck you, ACLU.

Isn’t it cute how every iteration of the NC idiotic toilet war gets reported on every channel and by every paper, yet nobody is talking about the denial of health benefits to the public workers of Illinois? We have little sick children, babies, people with cancer and Parkinson’s, pregnant women being denied care that they paid for and not allowed to switch providers. But the ridiculous drama of the blasted toilets in NC is a lot more important?

I’m also stunned at the dumbness of Democrats. They keep losing like they get paid to be the biggest suckers on the planet. Finally they manage to squeeze out a win in NC, and this is what they are choosing to piss it away on (pun intended)? And then they will wonder why people don’t come out to vote for them. They have lost all capacity to talk about real problems of real people, and those die-hards – like the IL Mike Madigan – who are still trying to help their constituents get no support from the party. 
And you know why?

Because big business is heavily invested into promoting the toilet melodrama as a way of distracting us from being robbed of the last tiny shreds of welfare. And the Democrats are playing into their hands. 

A good rule of thumb that Democrats used to remember: if huge corporations are suddenly very actively on your side, you have probably lost your way and ended up right in the toilet. 

I was hoping that at least the end of the election would remove the Trailer Chic lady out of sight. But no, her cheap peroxide and trucker stop clothes are moving into the White House. The Russian friends will be very happy because that’s the image of a woman they understand. 

This is why the concept of “hate speech” is dangerous and should be abandoned. Anything, literally anything at all can feel hateful to somebody. How do you prevent those who are offended by the very fact that you are speaking from rising to have power over you? 

And the same goes for the concept of hate crime that is being grievously overused.

A great post on the ridiculous anti-pornography measure proposed in South Carolina. 

Wikileaks is a Russian tool. Color me the least surprised that I’ve ever been. 

Kenan Malik is brilliant as usual on multiculturalism and integration. 

Only in America: “I regularly diagnose people with mental illnesses. I am myself diagnosed with a mental illness.” And I regularly give people failing grades for their incapacity to speak Spanish. I myself don’t speak a word of it, so I’m a total expert on the matter. 

A modern-day Gaugin but without the talent. 

A Dem Senator finally speaks out against the criminal over prescription of opioids that is driving the heroin epidemic, and the media go into overdrive trying to discredit him. Here is one example and here is another. The servility to drug pushers is pathetic.