Clarissa's Blog

And while I’m on the subjects that annoy me, Canadian healthcare system sucks. If that’s what free universal health care is, then fuck it.

MSNBC is running an hour-long feature glorifying Trump. I watched for 10 minutes, threw up at something like “since age 24 Trump was fiercely anti-establishment”, and turned off the TV.

People, help me out. Is this Roger Cohen who wrote the completely unhinged article in today’s NYTIMES the same Cohen who writes crazy Putinoid pieces for The Nation? Or is it a different Cohen? And if so, what made the bearers of such a glorious name suddenly go crazy en masse?

Now Trump is defending the love of his life Putin from charges of killing journalists.

The funny thing is that I have no idea which journalists Putin is supposed to have had killed either. I literally live inside the Russian news cycle and know an enormous lot about Putin’s crimes. The vicious little creep has done a lot of horrible things and keeps doing more of them every day. But I can’t think of any reporters Putin could have murdered. Moreover, I don’t know why he’d want to do that. The way the Russian media space is set up makes journalists extremely innocuous. Why would Putin want to waste energy on killing them?

This is all very mystifying. Everybody knows how much I detest Putin but can we discuss his real crimes instead of these imaginary charges? It doesn’t help to throw around accusations that nobody can substantiate.

It only took me a month to get through the idiotic Title IX training we have to take online. It’s the stupidest thing ever because it teaches professors how to adjudicate rape cases on campus. 

The very first requirement of the training is that if a student approaches me to communicate an instance of sexual assault or harassment, I need to “believe the student.” I have no idea how I can manufacture belief if it’s not something controlled by an act of will. There is no space for questioning these bizarre wisdoms, though. We have to accept whatever we are told by the brainless bureaucrats who come up with these idiotic seminars whether we like it or not.

Also, I find it quite disrespectful of my boundaries and invasive of my own sexual space that I have to be forced to listen to a litany of different forms of sexual penetration while I’m in the workplace. 

Immediately after the 2016 prognosis about the oil prices remaining low (and possibly going down to $20 per barrel) came out, Russian terrorists occupying the Donbass area of Ukraine became suddenly active. Within the past 24 hours, Russians shelled Ukrainian positions 12 times, using the kind of heavy artillery that the Minsk Agreements do not allow. Then they occupied a village that they’d left alone before.

It’s crucial that everybody understand that the fighting has been resumed because of the oil prices. I’m tired of people analyzing whatever happens in terms of what Obama said or Biden did. This is not about Americans at all. 

Putin is freaking out about the oil prices. Russia’s economy only exists for as long as the country can sell oil and gas at a profit. If oil prices go down, people become even more impoverished. Putin has to distract them from their poverty with military exploits and “victories.” 

I have already heard an intelligent person with a PhD suggest that Russians resumed fighting in Ukraine because Obama “sent weapons to Ukraine.” Which is a ridiculous fabrication.

People are so dishonest. Among everybody who rolled out the statistic about the 30,000 annual gun deaths in the US, not a single person was honest enough to mention that two thirds of these deaths were suicides, i.e. not preventable through gun control.

As thet say, don’t trust the stats you haven’t falsified yourself.

I finished Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, and I have some good news: it’s possible that European literature (and consequently European culture) is not dead. It might have simply been taking a nap. Not only did Houellebecq come out with something decent, now Ferrante has brought the clinically dead Italian literature back to life.

Everybody knows that Italian Studies are dead on this continent. At most, an American university might have an ancient Italian professor teaching Intermediate Italian in utter isolation. And if even Americans won’t study you, that means your culture is irredeemably lost.

Europe has not been producing anything massively valuable in terms of culture for quite a while. Spain, yes, but “Africa begins in the Pyrinees”, so it’s a question just how European it is. Plus, Spain is fertilized by the vibrant Latin America to whom it gave its language and culture. Also, I’m biased in Spain’s favor. Germans keep being as scatologically German as ever, and in the UK the valiant Zadie Smith single-handedly is trying to fill the gap where the British culture used to exist. Scandinavians produce tons of shallow commercial glop, and Eastern Europeans can’t even do that.

But now all of a sudden everybody is back to reading European novels and talking about European writers and the ideas they produce. And that’s huge. I hope this isn’t a fluke but, rather, one of those moments when the endlessly announced decline of the West once again fails to transpire.

Finally, the New York Times published a valuable, insightful piece on ISIS and Islam. It’s written by an author called Mustafa Akyol and is a lot better than any of the usual pieties on the subject. Highly recommended.

I love my fellow immigrants but sometimes we can get on anybody’s nerves.

In Montreal there was a blackout in one of the residential areas. 

“Well, it’s Canada,” announced an immigrant from Iraq contemptuously. “It’s not like anybody expected any better from Canada.”

This reminded me of a Russian woman from Yekaterinburg who said to me once with the same contemptuous shrug, “New York! Phe! That’s such a provincial little place. It’s even more pathetic than Paris.”