Clarissa's Blog

Whenever I cook anything except borscht that contains cabbage, N complains that the house smells too Russian. 

Everybody was telling me that Klara only says “Dada” because the “m” sound is harder to pronounce. And then last night (or is it tonight? I keep getting confused. The night that was 8 hours ago) she got hungry and I heard a very clear and distinct “Mamma! Mamma!” coming from her room. Because she knows that Mamma is the one to feed her at night.

What I find hilarious are the endless mullings of what Melania Trump can possibly feel. It’s as if people thought she is an actual wife and not an object of consumption. She’s not a wife in the sense I am a wife or you are a wife. She’s more like what my phone is to me: it’s convenient but it doesn’t have opinions of its own and I’ll trade it for a new model whenever I feel like it. 

I’m sure she experiences a vague sense of relief at the idea that Trump is groping somebody else because that means she’ll get groped less. But that’s about it. 

There is a whole industry of these Eastern European prostitutes. There are manuals, websites, magazines, blogs, etc that teach them how to empty themselves of all content and become perfect objects of consumption. They have meditation routines where they learn to care about nothing but shopping and looking a certain way. 

This is a parody of womanhood, of the idea of a woman as a gaping, bottomless hole that devours objects, that receives, receives, receives in complete silence and immobility. 

Eastern European women were forced to break with the traditional womanhood in a radical and painful way, and now many are compensating for the trauma. 

“Sometimes the job is the career, and sometimes the job is a means for subsidizing the career.”

That’s precisely the problem. I feel like the job and the career have become completely divorced in my life. They exist on different planes.

A friend of my mother’s lived with her husband for 30 years, and every year he took a photo of her in the same place with the same bouquet of flowers. And they ended up with a photographic progression where she changed and nothing else did. 

If N and I wanted to do something like this, we’d find it hard to come up with a place to take the photo that would remain the same for 30 years. We always relocate! 

N suggested McDonald’s. And instead of a bouquet, we could hold Big Macs. That’s definitely a possibility but the problem is, McDonald’s doesn’t mean anything to us. I have to look up the spelling every time I mention it. 

Does anybody have any suggestions? 

Trump has infected my mind with his verbal tics. I heard myself speak and knew it reminded me of something.

And that’s when the French invaded. So horrible. But the people of Spain decided to fight. So brave. That was so brave. Totally. 

I’m scaring myself with this. Maybe I shouldn’t watch the debate on Wednesday. 

And since I’m on it: I used to be passionately in favor of making all students take a year of a foreign language but now I changed my mind. Yes, it’s beyond useful to have exposure to another language and culture. But if people don’t want this super useful exposure, why force them? It’s like forbidding the use of cell phones in class. Yes, people waste their time and money if they are on Facebook instead of paying attention in class. But that’s their choice. Why should I care if they want to spend their resources this way? 

I don’t want to impose myself on unwilling students. I want to work with the willing ones only. 

Hey, folks, you have totally got to read this amazing story about an Orthodox Jew who converted a white supremacist leader to anti-racism. It’s the most endearing thing ever. 

That’s why young people are great. Their minds have not ossified. They can change their minds. How I love people who can change their minds. 

Back in New Haven, I had a boyfriend from a very well-to-do family who’d take me to New York to the opera. He wasn’t that into opera but for me he got season tickets.

Once we were driving back to New Haven at night, and his car stalled. The fellow freaked out something major. 

“This is South Bronx!” he said, shaking. “If the car doesn’t start right now, we’ll be murdered within 10 minutes. Because that’s the kind of neighborhood this is!” 

Given that a week earlier I refused to enter the Central Park on a Sunday afternoon because many episodes of Law & Order had convinced me I’d be raped and murdered immediately, I believed the boyfriend. Luckily, the car started and we survived. 

And yesterday I discovered that at that very moment N was actually living in South Bronx. And he has no idea what there was to be scared of. He doesn’t understand the boyfriend story at all. 

So here is the question: was N oblivious or was the boyfriend racist? I honestly have no idea whatsoever. And I still feel terrified of the Central Park.

Everywhere but in a small number of elite colleges, we are moving towards elimination of tenure and an army of contingent, cheap workers teaching primitive, basic courses that keep the gap between the elites and everybody else as wide as ever. 

In order to do away with the concept of a professor as a scholar and thinker, professors are being lured into teaching courses where they can easily be substituted by cheap, fungible part-timers. In foreign languages, this is being done through the narrative of “you can still be a professor and a scholar even when teaching Spanish 101.” Once a gullible or lazy professor buys into this narrative, it will become super easy to get rid of him altogether. 

My suggestion is: let’s not allow our expertise to be trivialized. Let’s remember that we are thinkers and intellectuals, and everybody, including students at state schools deserve access to our research and our knowledge.