At a voting poll in Canada, a letter from the Canadian government doesn’t suffice as proof of address. A bill from a private company, on the other hand, does.

At an entrance exam to a prestigious school for theater and film directors, students were given the assignment to stage the following scene. A man and a woman come to visit their friends. How can one make it immediately clear to the audience that they are husband and wife?

“Let them share a kiss the moment they come in,” one student suggested.

“But that could mean they are lovers or boyfriend and girlfriend,” the professor said.

“Let the man grumble, ‘I wish I never married you’,” said another student.

“But how do we know they aren’t divorced?” the professor retorted.

Finally, one talented student came up with the perfect answer.

“The man should remove a handkerchief from the woman’s handbag, blow his nose, and stick the handkerchief back into the handbag without saying anything.”

In order to show how inspired we are by Emma Sulkowicz (the woman who carried around a mattress at Columbia), my university will hold an event where students will bring decorated mattresses to campus and display them to demonstrate that we oppose rape. Then there will be a competition of these anti-rape mattresses, and the winners will get cash prizes. 

So whoever made the comment about selling ad space on the famous mattress, they were not that far off point.

P.S. And before anybody says anything, professors didn’t come up with this. Our student government did. 

On my trip to DC, I finally had some time to check out the novel that is attracting so much attention. After reading it, I can’t say I know what the hullabaloo is about. My Brilliant Friend is a solid but unremarkable addition to the genre of childhood and adolescence novels. I read a lot of this kind of thing when I was a kid because back in the USSR this was a genre that produced quite a bit of decent writing. Literature for adults and about adults was way too controlled ideologically while books about kids could avoid being quite as ideological. (They were still ideological, of course, but not to the crazy extent of the rest of available literature.)

The problem with this genre is that it is tied to the stages of human growth and ends up being way too scripted as a result. First toys, first friendships, first day at school, first fight, first book, pimples, insecurities, sexual awakening, first kiss, etc., etc. You can switch around a couple of these stages but that’s pretty much the only variation that the genre allows. 

There are a few ways of livening up this otherwise limited genre. One could work on the language to turn a pedestrian account of “she goes to school, she comes back from school, she does homework, she plays with her friends” into something a bit more like an actual work of art. One could set the childhood and adolescence in an interesting time in history and show how historic events shape the process of a child’s growth. Ferrante doesn’t do anything like that. History is even less than an afterthought in her novel, the writing is extremely straightforward, and the novel ends up being just like a million other childhood and adolescence novels. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good, decent contribution to the genre. If I read this book at the age of 12, I’d be all over it. I definitely recommend getting this book for an actual child or adolescent but I’m not sure what use an adult can derive from it other than relying on the novel for an undemanding beach or airport read.

On a serious note, it looks like the Trump rebellion might be coming to an end. The 9/11 remarks Trump is making seem calculated to boost Jeb’s anemic approval ratings. As you probably have heard, Wall Street donors are sticking with Jeb as their GOP candidate, and Trump looks ready to comply.

In downtown DC, we were just passed by a car with a sticker in Spanish that said, “Together with Romney.”

This confirms my observation that Hispanics who supported Romney were a bit slow on the uptake.

What’s especially hilarious is that many people who are happily nodding in agreement with the point of my preceding post (i.e. the leader of a huge organization who gets a sizeable remuneration for this job is responsible for whatever happens to the organization) are the same ones who had hissy fits when I suggested that Cecile Richards was responsible for the collapse of the organization she leads that happened on her watch.

The only difference between Richards-worshippers and Bush-worshippers is that they choose to be servile to a different very rich person. What these poor, facile creatures take for political opinions is simply a medieval need to be loyal to a feudal overlord.

It’s incomprehensible to the servile how one can possibly support ideas or principles instead of worshipping very rich people they have invested with magical significance. Ideas, to them, are nothing but a pretext that leads to the really important task: selecting their lord and master whom they will serve with all the passion of their sniveling little souls.

Yes, let’s now spend a year discussing whether George W. Bush was the US President in 2001.

The scariest thing about human beings is how gladly and how fast they erase their own memories in order to be as servile as possible.

Do you ever get this feeling of, “OK, I haven’t had a drop of liquor in months but I feel soused to the eyeballs”?

Last night, N and I went out for a walk here in DC, and all of a sudden I saw a stream of people dressed in identical shirts with the Russian last name “Ovechkin” on them pass me by. The stream seemed endless because more and more Ovechkins kept joining it.

“Ovechkin” in Russian comes from the word “sheep”, and the steady stream of these identical people bearing the word ” sheep” in Russian on their backs made me feel completely drunk in the midst of long-term sobriety.

Of course, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation to the advent of the Ovechkins in Washington, DC but we arrived at it after feeling like we were losing our mental capacities.

After the keratin treatment washed out, my hair went completely insane. Now I can’t even hope to get a brush through it. Gone are the times when I could actually run my fingers through it. It’s all a matted, tangled mess.

Strangely, though, people seem to dig the Gorgon look. I get stopped by strangers who want to admire it once or twice a day. Maybe I awaken some archetypal wild woman thing in them that they respond to.