This kind of thing is genuinely scary. This woman is going to have a stroke because there is nobody in her life, on TV, on the internet, or anywhere else to tell her that she needs to be treated for high blood pressure instead of guzzling pain meds.
This debate about ibuprofen has been going on for days, and many of the comments are heartbreaking. People have clear medical conditions that need urgent treatment. But somebody told them that pain is a normal part of life instead of the body’s way of warning us that something is not all right.
There is such a thing as temperament, which is completely physiological. A Latin American is a lot more hyper than a Scandinavian. A Ukrainian is more hyper than a Russian, but less so than a Latin American. A Swede or a German strikes me as too slow, while a Guatemalan is somewhat annoyingly too lively. I know somebody from Venezuela who is a deep introvert, but Anglos don’t perceive her as such because she is Latin American and so still much more sociable than an Anglo extrovert.
And it’s like that with everything. Every baseline is culturally mediated. What’s considered extremely pessimistic in one culture is completely normal in another. You can be a very agreeable American, but for a Hispanic, you might read as a curmudgeon.
I am glad that the televised execution of the Muslim terrorist has been cancelled. It was a bad idea. However, announcing the execution and then unannouncing it is awkward and ridiculous. You end up getting all of the blowback for something that, in the end, you don’t even do. You disappoint everybody who is in favor and receive all of the flak from everybody who is opposed.
This is a minor thing, so who cares? But the approach is similar to what happened with the war against Iran. There is a definite and clear lack of thinking things through.
Let’s attack them and see what happens.
What if they close the Strait of Hormuz?
Well, let’s attack them and see what happens.
We attacked them. They closed the Strait of Hormuz. Now nobody knows what to do.
Of course, compared to what the Democrats offer, this is all extremely minor. That goes without saying. I’m voting up-and-down-ballot Republican, not only in November but for the rest of my life. But we need to be more disciplined and less scatterbrained.
Here’s the thing. García Márquez is a Latin American writer. He’s the founder of much of the literature in the region, either as somebody to imitate or somebody to reject. He’s not Anglo. This isn’t good or bad, it simply is. The concerns you describe come from a different reality. They have a right to exist but I have what I believe is a valuable suggestion to make. You can use art from other regions as an access point to a different mentality. Not to adopt it, because that’s impossible anyway, but to admire the great variety of the universe.
The view of the sexes in Latin America is very different. I find this view to be ridiculous and somewhat embarrassing. But nobody is forcing us to do anything, you know? If you talk to Latin American women who are not in US academia, they’ll tear your hair out if you dare to suggest they aren’t inferior to men. They think they are inferior, and it’s the war of the sexes all day every day. Black, not black, it’s all the same in this respect. This is a culture that never had a Jane Eyre.
Another thing it never had is MLK Jr. In particular, “black women” as an ontological category is not a thing there. It’s not a thing anywhere outside of the US. It’s very hard to transmit the shock one experiences when one comes to the United States and realizes how obsessed, conflicted, and engaged people are with race. Even in Canada, it’s simply not there. The categories for understanding the world are very different.
These are all fascinating issues, so thank you for this great question.
A novel about a 60-year-old professor getting exploited by a self-prostituting graduate student could be a great read. This is a real phenomenon that I observed many times. Not at my current university because we don’t get paid enough and have no power to advance anybody’s career but at other places. I’ve never seen a female professor succumb because zero prestige accrues to a woman who pays a younger man for sexual services. But I’m sure it happens, if extremely rarely and very secretively. For some reason, people think that in such pairings it’s the younger person who gets exploited but in reality the dupe is always the older, paying individual.
In Shriver’s novel, it’s a female professor who purchases a relationship with a much younger male graduate student. This could be an excellent story if the writer showed realistic depictions of academic life and how such relationships usually evolve. But this was Shriver’s first novel, and she was not yet very good at the mechanics of writing. If you’ve read anything by Emma Cline, The Female of the Species is pretty much the opposite of Cline’s writing. Instead of telling a story, Schriver dedicates inordinate amounts of time to vaguely Freudian explorations of the characters’ antecedents. This ends up being extremely boring because nobody really needs an explanation of why somebody is tempted to sleep around for money and perks.
I have no idea why the word female is in the title, given that women are notoriously hypergamous and almost never invest money and reputation into cute boys half their age. I can’t think of any activity more humiliating to a woman than having to pay for sex. Shriver’s female protagonist is not representative of women.
I’m glad I read the novel and grateful to the person who recommended it because I’m interested in Shriver and her trajectory as an author. She grew enormously as a writer in the four decades since her first book.
I spend so much time at airports that I’ve had a chance to notice that the Delta lounge at Laguardia serves the same dish as the Maple Leaf lounge at the Montreal Trudeau airport.
It’s chicken stewed in mushroom sauce.
At Laguardia, though, it tastes terrible. Dry, chewy, just bad. In Maple Leaf, it’s extremely tasty.
It’s not an oddity. Food in Canada is vastly superior to food in the US. Everything tastes better. And it’s comparable because it’s often the same dishes and the same recipes.
I’m reading History of the Spanish Far Right by Gerardo Muñoz Lorente, and it’s fascinating how, until the moment of Franco’s death, there was an enormous number of groups, organizations, and associations of right-wing and conservative nature in Spain. And then they all become completely irrelevant in a blink of an eye. (Neo)liberalism won easily and massively.
The left in its traditional sense also got destroyed at that very moment. Neoliberalism wipes out both the traditional left and the traditional right. Its grand bargain is the complete removal of traditional morality in exchange for an acceptance of the neoliberal economic policy. You get to have tons of consequence-free sex with strangers, and nobody cares. In return, you gradually move towards the gig economy, an exploding precariat, and exclusion from many forms of private property.
In Spain, this is said completely openly. How dare you complain about the existing economy? What are you, against sexual freedoms? The best-selling Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes wrote a string of 800-page novels making exactly this point.
The pre-neoliberal stage of capitalism needed stable, sedentary populations that were tied to their communities. Neoliberalism needs the exact opposite.
I’m taking another flight tomorrow, my friends. After everything that happened, I’m feeling very neurotic about flights. I’m planning to show up 4 hours early, which, as AI tells me, is the earliest that I can check in my bags.
It’s a nonstop flight, which is supposed to maximize my chances finally to get there.
In modernism, the form is more important than the content. The means of artistic expression are way more significant than the message that is being expressed. It’s okay not to express any message at all, as long as you have found an original, striking, or unusual artistic form.
A modernist artist doesn’t tell you a story or show you a picture. He tries to get you to come up with the story or the picture. His art often makes no sense at all because modernism is about questioning the very need for things to make sense.
Modernist art tries to disturb you. It doesn’t try to appeal to passive consumers. It doesn’t lecture or teach. It doesn’t try to explain anything about the world. Instead, it is trying to get you to wonder why explanations matter and why you look for their source outside of yourself.
All of this sounds kind of cute. The first encounters with this art are exciting, but then the message that there is no message gets old.
You need it to be somewhat crispy because otherwise the texture is way too mushy.
Why not cook the chicken in the broth with the cabbage? A.
I never tried cabbage with fish. Do you think it would really work?
You made me think. I might give this a try with sardines rather than the chicken.
Simple, but it does sound good. I’ll try making it some time.
It’s not that the age of nations is unbearable. It’s that neoliberalism is way too enjoyable. A salad is tasty,…
It’s not that the age of nations is unbearable. It’s that neoliberalism is way too enjoyable. A salad is tasty,…
I’m so glad you’re enjoying Vivien. In my opinion, it’s the best novel W.B. Maxwell ever wrote. People can download…
Clarissa, I deeply respect what you attempt here. However, nobody has ever unscrambled an egg. If people are turning away…
In his last collection of writings, Cold Friday, I highly recommend it, Chambers predicted the demise of the USSR by…
Part of what I thought made I Claudius so great was the fact that Robert Graves was able to put…
*individual depictions
“I mean, of course, to the extent that reading about an endless succession of Latin American atrocities can be enjoyable.”…
methlethyl There is litle doubt that the Church altered Western thought affecting both the formation o the nuclear family: https://janetakesonhistory.org/2020/09/29/the-medieval-church-and-its-consequences/…
Very interesting! I might need to read it. All of the writers of the Boom led lives of almost exotic…
Gerald Martin’s Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life is out. Apparently it’s just as lurid (“dishy” in the reviewer’s parlance) as…
“despite the complete lack of evidence” What would count as “evidence”? It’s a theoretical and suppositional work about cognitive models…
Congratulations
The theory in question has been around for fifty years and seems to have a mythic fascination despite the complete…
This is so beautiful!! Thank you so much. N and Klara gave me a little painting from my favorite local…
Congratulations! Did you know that “In the French tradition, this is the noces de rose, or rose anniversary”? What a…
I read this interesting story (in Russian) – an example of Jewish life – https://auvasilev.livejournal.com/2463561.html
“squeeze my modern brain through a weird keyhole” Some movies can do something like that. The first time I saw…
Right??? A beautiful sight to see. And by the way, I did ask my husband whether the comment about how…
It has been fascinating to live through progressively deeper questioning about the nature of humanity, reality, the nature and purpose…
It’s most definitely going in that direction. Children who grow up watching short-form videos on a screen for a large…
Happy Anniversary! A special bouquet! https://www.theblackpeppercorn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/How-to-Roast-Peeled-Garlic-in-the-Oven-5.jpg
Congratulations and many happy returns of the day! -K
“to nudge people toward the idea that AI is conscious” Would I sound like a crazy paranoid lunatic if I…
AI is most certainly not conscious. After I shared the list of the books I read since 2008 with AI,…
I expect the real point of the article is to nudge people toward the idea that AI is conscious because…
Happy anniversary! A loving marriage is indeed a wonderful state
Historically the Dutch East India company restricted expansion in SA, since conflict would reduce their profits. It was the arrival…
Here is a link to review / discussions of that 1970s book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22478.The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
Actually, this does help. Thank you for saying that. I have to keep telling myself that I must respect her…
We definitely had a great middle class society in those days. The only problem was 80% of the population were…
My mother was just the opposite of yours — she went to every doctor appointment, took every test she was…
That’s the first I’d heard of it.
There are certain medieval authors I’ve greatly enjoyed for this reason– because I have to sort of squeeze my modern…
