Over the weekend, there’s been a shooting in downtown St Louis and six separate instances of bullets hitting cars on the highways leading to and from St Louis.

The local newscasters are now asking viewers to call if we have any ideas on what to do about the insanely high level of violence in St Louis and the climbing murder rate.

By the way, why are my posts about violence in St Louis always downvoted? Are people jealous that I’m not writing about violence in their areas, or what?

Putin finally got to deliver the speech at the UN General Assembly that he’d been so desperate to give. Huge expectations had been built in Russia over this speech. People were told that Putin was about to reveal something so massively important that the world needed to sit up and listen.

Putin came to the General Assembly, opened his mouth and. . . said nothing. Nothing even remotely different from the same tired old stuff he’s been saying for years.

“Americans didn’t manage to be good Americans. Please elect us to be Americans, and we’ll promise to be much better Americans than these current Americans.”

Everybody has heard it a million times already but poor deluded Putin seems convinced that the problem is that people don’t understand what a great deal he’s offering.

This is why people in Ukraine and Syria need to keep dying: their deaths give Putin an opportunity to reiterate, yet again, the same boring message of “We can be much better Americans than the current, etc, etc.”

Rebecca Schuman really loves her baby. She publishes one endless post after another about that very fortunate, happy little girl. For those who were not this loved as children, catching a glimpse of Rebecca’s worship of her baby does not come without a pang. There is nothing more destructive to a human psyche than the knowledge that one’s parents did not love one coming to the surface, and Rebecca’s paeans to her baby have the potential to force people to face this deeply hidden truth.

When that happens, a human psyche finds itself on the verge of destruction. So people react violently in order to counteract the horrible threat. They revert to the persona of a wounded child and try to remove the danger, screaming as hard as they can to drown out the memory of never having even a shred of the riches that Rebecca’s daughter enjoys.

“You are ugly!” they vociferate with the voices of rejected, scared little children. “Go kill yourself! I will tell on you! You are hurting me! Go away!”

I hope nobody thinks I’m trying to excuse these fuckers. It is a – no, wait – it is THE  responsibility of every adult to deal with our psychological garbage and avoid spreading it around other people’s lives. It is nobody’s duty to self-censor in order to spare you from freaking out over the shit you are too irresponsible, immature, and stupid to take care of. A person who feels pain and reacts by persecuting others and sending them hateful messages has no excuse.

These people’s punishment, though, lies inside themselves. The untreated wound festers, hurts, poisons their entire lives. Rebecca will go on adoring her baby and enjoying her existence. And the former unloved children will live their entire lives beating back the painful truth and wasting all of their life energy on this impossible task.

Here is the whole story.

So as I’ve been telling you, Big Government Rauner whom the devil has inflicted as governor on the state of Illinois is preventing the medical insurance of university workers to pay for our health care procedures.

The workers keep paying the premiums, there’s a ton of money in the system, the only problem is that Rauner is refusing to release that money for no reason other than being a lazy, hateful fucker.

What’s even more ridiculous, the fact that workers can’t get any medical care dies not constitute “a qualifying event” for us to seek alternative coverage. We can’t switch to our spouses’ insurance plans or seek coverage through Obamacare. Our only option is to exist without medical care indefinitely while Rauner lives large on the state dime in his mansion.

It’s the most insane thing I have ever had the misfortune to observe. Thousands of people are robbed of their money and denied medical care because of a whim of one deranged, hateful fellow. You’ll say we are to blame because we elected this piece of garbage. And yes, you are right, we are paying for our own collective idiocy. Let this situation at least serve as a warning to people who vote under the influence of empty clichés and silly lies.

And since we are on the subject of deeply obnoxious inmaturity:

I am a junior scholar with a secret: I enjoy Masterpiece Theatre’s British period drama Downton Abbey. Actually, “enjoy” is quite the understatement. And this is a very, very difficult thing for me to admit publicly. . . As an academic, I find myself apologizing, or overexplaining, to other scholars my interest in this show should the topic arise.

. . In conversations, I find myself explaining that I am quite “well aware of the racial and classist problematics,” as a way of introducing, framing and apologizing for my love of the show.

Jesus, lady, unclench. Nobody gives a rat’s ass what you do or don’t watch. The world is not breathlessly awaiting updates on your entertainment choices. If you are very lucky, there are a few relatives and friends who might be nice enough to pay attention to which TV shows you watch. Everybody else is too busy living their life to notice.

And the references to “classist problematics” in regard to a TV show make you sound like a twerp of massive proportions.

This is what people who insist at 15 that their Daddy take them to a playground amidst plentiful conversation grow up to be like.

These chirpy, vapid drama queens give a bad name to all academics.

A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation.

I believe the author is either lying or the boy in question suffers from a form of mental retardation. He’s 15 and he says things like “My parents are raising me”? And he wants to eat dinner with his parents? And have them engage him in “plentiful family conversation”? And he actually said the words “plentiful family conversation”?

Another possibility is that the boy is a sociopath in the making and says these things because he knows they will please the clueless adults.

Normal teenagers at this age want to be left alone in their rooms with their porn, video games, social networks, weird music, and drama. They don’t want to be “raised by parents amidst shared meals and plentiful conversation.” We have already established that this is a very kind and gentle society that delays development but that doesn’t cancel out hormonal processes, does it?

I’m being asked why I don’t support the independence of Catalonia when I did support the independence of Ukraine back in 1991.

In Ukraine, more than 90% of people voted for independence. That’s an overwhelming, unassailable majority. In Catalonia (Scotland, Quebec, etc), the break down is 50/50, and if independence does manage to squeak by, it will be by a couple of percentage points.

Besides, Ukrainians were ready to pay for their independence, and did pay, and are still paying. Catalonians, on the other hand, are demonstrating childish behavior when they declare they will continue being part of the EU even though the EU doesn’t want them.

Still, if Catalonians do act stupidly and vote for independence, I don’t think anybody should detain them by force or do anything violent to them.

We just came back from a great theater performance. I love theater with a passion of 100 literary critics and feel great compassion for people who don’t know how to enjoy this form of art.

We watched All the Way, a play about LBJ’s efforts to push the Civil Rights Act through the Congress and then his campaign against Goldwater. It is disturbing how, in spite of all the obvious and great progress, we are still hearing the same arguments and witnessing the same debates. The Voter Rights Act is once again sorely needed, the anti-gay sentiments are verbatim what the anti-black arguments were in 1964, etc. The play brought this home in a powerful way.

The only weak part of the play was the actor playing MLK. He was way too young and signally lacking in charisma and gravitas to play this part. If MLK had been as limp as this fellow made him out to be, we’d still be drinking from separate water fountains. This actor would take MLK’s powerful lines and deliver them with less enthusiasm than I show when I lie to my neighbor that her dog is cute.

Before the play, N was at the Strange Loop conference and then came to meet me at the Strange Folk festival. I have no idea why everything was about being strange in St Louis today but the city did look strangely alive.

The Strange Folk festival was so strange that it had a stall that sold. . . old Soviet pocket watches.

I saw myself in the mirror at the glass maker’s booth and realized that I couldn’t be happier with how stylish and put together I look, even though my hair has gone completely nuts again. People  (women only, of course. This isn’t Cuba) were touching me all the time at the festival because they loved my applique, my barrettes, my shawl, my handbag, etc. That was very funny.

Author: Belén Gopegui

Title: El comité de la noche

Language: Spanish

Year: 2014

I never read anything by Gopegui before because from the references to her work that I saw in criticism I thought she was not my kind of writer. This novel, however, demonstrated that, often, critics cannot be trusted. Gopegui is quite a good novelist.

The Committee of the Night came at the perfect time for me because I needed one more text to analyze to round out my book. This novel says exactly what I need it to say to support my argument.

There are moments in the novel where Gopegui the ideologue loses out to Gopegui the writer. By the end of the novel, though, the author manages to pull herself together, stop editorializing and make the novel work. This is a very surprising, pleasant discovery for me.

OK, who wants to hear a really short joke?

Here goes: Saudi Arabia will head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel.

It would be immensely funny if it weren’t true.