Clarissa's Blog

So Rubio is going for every stereotype of a white Cuban boy: lazy, a Momma’s boy, and handy with somebody else’s credit card.

Cute. All that’s left is for a couple of black mistresses to surface and the image will be complete.

Forbes decided to throw a childish tantrum in Obama’s direction and proclaimed Putin the most powerful person on the planet. Of course, the powerful Putin made a total ass of himself in Ukraine and was so embarrassed about it that he’s now making an ass of himself in Syria to get people to forget his pathetic trouncing at the hands of Ukrainians.

His powerfulness is not managing to prevent Russian airplanes falling out of the sky like overripe pears or the country’s economy sinking like it’s trying to compete with the Titanic.

One can only wonder what Mr. Powerful will do after Syrians whoop his ass the way they know how to do and oil prices sink to under $35 per barrel.

What is the purpose of this portrait of Putin? Who is supposed to use it and how?

The correct answer is under the fold.

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So you know how I hate movies, right? There is one movie, though, that I can watch time and again and again and again and never tire of it.

The movie is Groundhog Day.

It’s no masterpiece but I LOVE the rigid, repetitive structure. The sound of that song that plays over the radio every time the clock hits 6 am is hypnotic because it’s always the same.

This is the reason I love Law & Order, too. The structure is very predictable, and I dig that.

No, I haven’t had a lot of stability in my life.

But I’m really happy I’m not part of this generation either:

This is particularly distressing, Sax says, because the culture youths learn from one another is one of disrespect and indignity. Sax finds it in popular TV shows such as Dog with a Blog, Jessie, and Liv and Maddie, which display adults as clueless and incompetent, as well as hip-hop music and pornography (which boys view avidly).

These are the creeps who produced the weirdos of the previous post.

LinkedIn is promoting a “Bring your parents to work” day.

There are times when I’m really glad that I’m too old to belong to this generation.

The other day I realized that I’d been so immersed in my sabbatical that I hadn’t even engaged in my hobby of reading trashy mystery novels for a scarily long time.

Plus, I needed something that would make the tedious Gutierrez novel more palatable, so I accompanied it with Elizabeth George’s latest addition to the Havers / Lynley series titled A Banquet of Consequences And it turned out that after three very disappointing novels, George is back full strength! She has gone back to the winning formula of her first bestseller of the series, A Great Deliverance. Shocking sexual perversions! Havers developing new interests in life! A domineering mother and a spineless daughter-in-law! A pathetic, beaten down husband! An angry feminist!

Ah, this was a peach of a mystery novel.

There are few things I hate more than reading things I don’t want to read. I had to read this stupid novel because I can’t avoid at least mentioning it in my book, and I can’t mention something I didn’t read. For two miserable years, I would start this poorly written, boring novel, and then give up. And today I finally finished it!

The reason I hated Gutierrez’s novel so much is because it’s written in the North American postmodernist tradition of Pynchon, Burroughs, Delillo, etc that I detest. It’s the smirky, smart-assy, self-congratulatory branch of postmodernism that doesn’t deserve to polish the shoes of the great Hispanic postmodern tradition of José Donoso, Juan Benet, Juan Goytisolo, etc. Why a Spanish writer in 2012 would want to resuscitate the putrid corpse of early American postmodernism instead of feeding on the vibrant and beautiful postmodern tradition in his own language is a mystery. This kind of thing was in vogue in Spain 25-30 years ago when there was still a deep-seated belief that everything Spanish was inferior to everything American, but this was a long time ago.

I can’t even think of anybody else who writes this way in Spain these days. The obnoxious Generation Xers have either faded from the literary scene (like Ray Loriga mostly did) or swapped the immature worship of the US for writing books that actually make sense (Benjamin Prado is an example of the latter approach.)

I can only hope that I never have to suffer through anything else by this author.

Another Russian airplane just crashed. This time it was a small Cessna, and it crashed over the Crimea. Four people are dead.

I’m not going to do this every day because it gets extremely repetitive but that’s how things are with Russian planes, buses, ships, etc.

I just want you to imagine what goes on with the country’s nuclear arsenal. What are the chances that it is being attended with due care?

I find it entirely unbelievable that the Charlie Hebdo shooting happened less than a year ago. I actually had to Google it right now because I was convinced that it’s been much, much longer. I’ve lived so much since then, I’m an entirely different person. So much has happened in my life – and it’s only been 10 months ago??

This post is not about Charlie Hebdo per se. It was an event that left a vivid memory and I remember exactly where I was (at a coffee-shop in Montreal’s Hampstead) when I first heard about it. So now it serves as a way to measure personal time.