If there is one word to describe the bestseller list, it’s escapism. Disillusioned Wall Street millionaires, representatives of the middle-class who live in mansions with private lakes, people who never had a stroke of work to do in their lives and are bored out of their heads populate the pages of current bestsellers. Things have become so bad that there are even several novels trying to milk World War II for excitement. Solzhenitsyn used to say that a writer turns to World War II out of sheer desperation when there is absolutely nothing else to write about. And unlike the current WWII milkmaids, Solzhenitsyn actually fought in the war.

After studying these reading options, one could conclude that nothing at all is happening in this country. There is no opioid epidemic that is killing off entire towns, there is no human tragedy on the scale of the one that gave us Grapes of Wrath happening right now, there are no decaying, rusting and collapsing villages strewn around all over the country. No, it’s all bored rich folks and their navel-gazing and the doomed love affairs of 70 years ago.

Since there are no works of fiction that talk about anything that matters today, one has to turn to non-fiction. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis lacks any artistic value and the author is a bit too primitive for my liking. But at least this autobiography tries to reflect on the collapse and chaos of life in Appalachia. Vance has been very successful at fleeing his sad little town in rural Ohio and becoming a graduate of Yale Law School. Many of his relatives and friends, however, are trapped in the Rust Belt hopelessness they have lived in their whole lives.

There is no single solution to the collapse of working class life in America. But Vance makes it clear that the narratives his fellow hillbillies get from the media, the Internet, and the politicians are not helping. “It’s not the government’s, Obama’s, or corporations’ fault you are a loser,” he points out. “It’s your own.”

The greatest tragedy of the people Vance knows in Appalachia is that they were so traumatized as children by the disgusting, utterly piggish behavior of their idiot parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc that the trauma hobbles them for life. And then they visit the same destruction on their own children and so on. 

I’m as different as one can imagine from this fellow, yet I can’t remember reading a book, a blog, an article, etc. by anybody I’d be able to identify like I did with him. At least, I didn’t feel like a creature from a different planet when I read this autobiography like I do when I read all these Amandas Marcotte, Jessicas Valenti, Jonathans Franzen, Toms Frank, the creepazoids on CHE or IHE, etc. Vance isn’t as dedicated to self-pity and drama-queenishness as these folks, and that’s something already. He does tend to exaggerate and even invent personal hardship but at least he’s trying to figure out the world. 

I liked this autobiography because it’s written by a real person with real questions about life and not by a robot who delivers canned narratives s/he thinks sound right and ideologically pre-approved.

When Klara was still only 4 months old, I taught her that when I extended my index fingers horizontally  (like bike handlebars), she needed to grab them, and I’d lift her up. It isn’t easy for her to grab my fingers with her tiny little hands but she does it every single time. What’s really shocking is that she understands that she needs to do it. And it wasn’t even hard to teach her. I only had to show her a few times, that’s all. 

In a small town in Southern Italy, refugees are given fake money that serves as vouchers. The fake banknotes look in a very unexpected way:

Rather than featuring European architectural gems, they bear the likenesses of a collection of communists and leftist leaders – Che Guevara on the fake €10 note, Hugo Chavez on the €20 and Karl Marx on the €50.

It’s quite pathetic to see sated, bored Europeans play these stupid games. 

One great piece of advice from Academaze is never to enter into long and tortured explanations that nobody asks you for. If you can’t make it to a committee or a meeting, just say, “No, I can’t be there.” 

This is especially pertinent for women who often do feel the need to accompany every “no, I can’t” with “because I only have the sitter until 3 pm and I don’t think my husband can get out of work early, I mean, he sometimes can but this week he has a project, so I don’t think I can make it, sorry, but there is a ton of this other shit I’m willing to do to overcompensate for the terrible sin of having a life outside of work.” 

That inner guilt-tripper that makes you constantly apologize for existing is not your friend. 

Our local Macy’s is the only place where I can’t help wishing I were fatter. They have amazing clothes in huge sizes. Maybe they do it on purpose, to make everybody feel at peace with not being thin.

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The workers at Teavana always stump me by asking, “And what brings you to our store?” I immediately begin to wonder what else can bring people to Teavana if not the desire to buy tea.

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I realized that I haven’t bought any new clothes (aside from two $20 maternity dresses) for 2,5 years. First, I was hoping to get pregnant, then I was pregnant, then I was at the stage of, “Hey, when’s the baby due?” “Three months ago!” So today was the day of my happy reunion with clothes. And I didn’t at all hate it. 

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Only in America do you begin to read an autobiography of a fellow whose claim to fame is that he worked his way out of poverty, and then it turns out that the poverty he escaped from entailed an income of $100,000 per year. 

We asked our job candidate how she handles discipline issues in the classroom. This summer she’s been teaching East St Louis high schoolers, so discipline issues were unavoidable.

She said that when she wanted the students to pipe down or take off their headphones, she would say, “Silence, please!” or “Please remove the headphones” but not in her regular voice. She’d say it in all kinds of weird,  funny voices. (Like the way I say “phau-t-hay-toes” to make Klara laugh.) And this is when I knew that she was a real teacher.

The only way to have authority in the classroom is to relinquish it. It’s like a boomerang: let it go and it will come back to you. A real teacher isn’t afraid of looking silly, saying “I have no idea”, and singing in a horribly off-key voice to make students laugh (like I sometimes do.) Students see that you are comfortable and relax. And when they are not anxious, they don’t need to act out.

It’s always the teachers who fight for power that have the worst discipline issues. All of these “Hand in the essay a minute after 5 pm and I’ll take off 10%!”, “Each instance of tardiness reduces your attendance grade!”, etc are completely counterproductive.  

It’s important never to listen to anybody because people don’t even mean most of what they say. And I, with my literal mind, keep taking everything in dead earnest.

Today I slept in, and then we went straight to lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. After that, we headed to the Gardens where we walked and admired turtles in the pond, butterflies at the Monarch way station and baby deer in the forest. I finished reading a new mystery novel. N had a long siesta.

Tomorrow we are going to Macy’s and then to a Japanese restaurant. 

We’d be doing the exact same thing if Klara weren’t here. The only difference is that we are enormously happier because she is so funny and delightful. All of these people who kept saying that a baby changes your life completely, nothing is ever the same, you can’t do any of the things you used to do were making meaningless noises. I was very scared of having children because of all this apocalyptic screeching. How stupid of me! There aren’t even any opportunities to feel self-sacrificing and deprived. 

This is the “life on the tenure-track is so teeeeerrrrrrible” lie all over again. 

I’ll never listen to people again, that’s for sure.

So it looks like Erdogan’s cute little coup was wildly successful, eh? It was a masterful way of steering Turkey even farther away from the legacy of the great Ataturk, a secular democracy, and towards a fundamentalist dictatorship. Europe is flailing and trying to join it seems like a waste of time, so it makes sense to stop playing at democracy and secularization.

Now it has become clear why Erdogan made nice with Putin. He has finally made a choice of what the country’s future should be like. Tricking a group of malcontent generals into a doomed coup that would be easily defeated was super easy. The future of democracy in the region has never looked more bleak.

On campus, a very young man asked if Klara is my daughter or granddaughter. The funny thing is that it’s a perfectly reasonable question: I’m an old, old mother. And I know exactly who to blame. Bananas.

When N heard that our little nephew was given banana puree as his first solid food, he said that had he been given bananas back in 1976, he’d grow up to be a much happier person and would have met me 15 years sooner. But we weren’t raised on this kind of sweetness and our lives turned out way too bitter for way too long.

P.S. Do I need to explain that bananas are a metaphor and it’s not actual bananas I’m talking about?

A reporter on TV: “Breaking news! The Nice attacker was not a member of ISIS! The attack was probably criminal and not terrorist in nature!”

Because ISIS has membership cards and this fellow didn’t get his. 

These idiots, seriously.