Every year or so, I get wildly enthusiastic about a writer and a philosopher (thinker, literary critic) and read everything by them. My intellectual life started in 1999, and here is my list of formative authors for each year. The first in every line is a writer and the other one is a thinker / critic / philosopher.

1999: Juan Rulfo and Sarmiento
2000: Benito Perez Galdos and Octavio Paz (I don’t get Paz’s poetry and only read his essays)
2001: Leopoldo Alas and Fernandez Retamar
2002: Larra and Benedict Anderson
2003: Juan Goytisolo and Antony Smith
2004: Juan Marse and Fredric Jameson
2005: Mario Vargas Llosa and Ernst Curtius
2006: Espido Freire and Terry Eagleton
2007: Pardo Bazan and Foucault
2008: Munoz Molina and Alain Badiou
2009: Edmundo Paz Soldan and Giorgio Agamben
2010: Rosa Montero and Zygmunt Bauman
2011: Almudena Grandes and Jonathan Mayhew
2012: Benjamin Prado and Slavoj Zizek
2013: Andrés Trapiello and Helen Graham
2014: Rafael Chirbes and Philip Bobbitt

I have realized that “mushroom julienne” does not mean the same thing in English as in Russian. Our juliennes are mushrooms stewed in white wine and then baked with shredded parmesan, nutmeg,  and heavy whipping cream.

N and I have exchanged our Christmas stockings. We both tried to give each other toy hedgehogs. N was successful: he gave me two really great hedgehogs. My hedgehog, however, turned out to be a frog. I bought it in the last week of the semester when I was exhausted and not in full control of my faculties. I do remember wondering why the hedgehog I bought was green but I had no energy to investigate.

Merry Christmas!

Rafael Chirbes, one of the greatest living writers of Spain, quotes with approval the words of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki:

Most writers understand literature to the same extent as birds understand ornitology.

Chirbes agrees with the critic.

I have long observed that a writer’s analysis of his or her own work is often a lot more pedestrian and drab than what my sophomores can come up with as readers.

I somehow managed to miss the following great news:

President Barack Obama on Friday said he would ban exports of goods, technology or services to Ukraine’s Crimea region, and called on Russia to end its annexation of the region.

In a statement, Obama said his order “is intended to provide clarity to U.S. corporations doing business in the region and reaffirm that the United States will not accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea.”

The measures followed similar moves by the European Union this week. Canada also announced such measures on Friday.

The Cuban Embargo (which, I believe, was an important symbolic gesture even if it didn’t and couldn’t reach any goals inside Cuba*) is coming to its end. The time for a new but equally important symbolic gesture has come. This will really boost morale among Ukrainians.

Let’ hope the rest of the day brings the same kind of Christmassy news.

* It reached important goals inside the US, though. The Cuban immigrant community in the US is very successful. To an immigrant, having the new society say, “We are with you and against the regime that you fled” is very important.

Since it’s a festive time of the year, let’s concentrate on the positive side of global warming:

It’s been no secret that Ukraine is in for a rough winter this year: for months, we’ve known that the country’s energy supply was flirting with an inability to meet demand. Now, as winter has finally arrived, Kiev’s energy strategy seems to rely on the hope that temperatures don’t drop too low. . . This Christmas, global warming could do some good for a change.

As annoying as this weirdly warm winter is to me personally, it will be amazing if these temperatures keep in Ukraine until March. Kharkiv, the city where I was born in Ukraine, has the same climate as Montreal, Canada. As you can imagine, it can get bitterly cold in winter. I remember sleeping in a fur-coat with every blanket in the house piled on top of me back in 1996-7 whenever the Russians would turn off the energy supply to pressure Ukraine’s government into something or other.

The former head of the BBC News World Service is ringing an alarm bell about Putin’s pet propaganda network, Russia Today. The Guardian reports: “As the World Service has pared back, Russia Today has expanded spectacularly. The network, which broadcasts a pro-Kremlin interpretation of world events in English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, launched a UK-focused channel based in Millbank, central London, recently and plans to launch German and French channels next year. Putin will next year increase its global budget by 40% to 15.38bn roubles (£183m), up from 11.87bn roubles this year. The channel boasts of a worldwide reach of 700 million – while never disclosing the actual size of its audience – after expanding its Spanish service across South America.

Well, color me unsurprised. For months, all I’ve been hearing from normal, well-meaning people is “separatists in Ukraine,” “there is a civil war going on in Ukraine,” and “I don’t support Putin but.”  These poor folks have no idea that what they are so faithfully reproducing is Putin’s propaganda. They actually get upset when I ask them why they love Putin so much.

It would be great if people tried to trace the origin of these implanted beliefs in their own minds. If you are so convinced there are separatists in Ukraine without ever talking to a single Ukrainian and barely knowing where the country is located, how did the word “separatists” come into your mind? Did you read it or hear it on TV? And how do you know that the journalist who first wrote or said it has not been paid to do so by Putin’s agents or (which is much more likely) isn’t a lazy arm-chair loser who is reluctant to do the work and is very easily fed this information by those who are paid to do so?

A week doesn’t pass (well, now it does because I’m on vacation but before that it didn’t) without me meeting a seemingly reasonable academic who regales me with a speech that I have already heard on Russian TV. When I gently point out that this is an almost verbatim translation of Putin’s propaganda of the week, my interlocutor gets upset and always – and I mean absolutely without exception – responds, “Of course, I don’t support Putin but you’ve got to agree that he has reason to be upset with the West.” I have no idea who first came up with this line or how much money went into implanting it in so many people’s heads, but let me tell you, it’s creepy when one person after another delivers it with robotic precision.

These days, it’s very easy to spread propaganda. Many people don’t have a developed capacity to think. What they consider thoughts are actually snippets of things they saw on Facebook, heard on the radio, glimpsed in the check-out line at the grocery store. Take any idea, no matter how outrageous it is, repeat it enough times and through enough media, and you will soon hear people repeat it verbatim as if it were something they came up with on their own.

So this is my Christmas Eve program:

In the morning, I will work on my new book. It will be Day 10 on my new Seinfeld Chain. My longest Seinfeld Chain was 104, and I need to break that record.

Then I will cook my vegetarian dinner.

After that, I will do beauty and relaxation procedures.

N and I will exchange gifts after the Christmas Eve dinner. We decided to adopt my sister’s genius solution to the Christmas / New Year’s dilemma that haunts every immigrant from my culture. The Big Gifts will be exchanged on New Year’s Eve. But Christmas will not remain gift-free. We will exchange stockings filled with a collection of small gifts we’ve been gathering for each other for the past month. N’s surprise gifts include a fancy sleeping mask, very chic socks, sweets, and a few more things.

After dinner and gifts, we will drive around, enjoying the Christmas decorations people have put up in our town.

Then we will come back home, light the fireplace, and watch Russian TV shows.

Merry Christmas, everybody! Remember that for those who don’t celebrate Christmas I will keep publishing fun and exciting posts all through Christmas. Unlike other blogs, this one is not going dark during the festivities.

Getting emails from people who tell me, “I followed a link back from X website to your blog and now I can’t stop reading because it’s addictive.” That’s very pleasing to me.

Today I got such an email from somebody who traveled back from The XX Committee. I should write even more angry posts linking to people who annoy me.

I should do more self-promotion because I’m sure more people should be exposed to this great blog. (I mean mine, not The XX Committee.) Maybe this should be my New Year’s resolution.

Once again, I’m facing the need to combine my cultural traditions with the local ones. We already have two Christmas trees to signal our two Christmases, and now I have to figure out how to make, process and digest two huge meals within a single week: Christmas and New Year’s.

So I have come up with a genius idea: vegetarian Christmas! It’s tricky to come up with a festive dinner that is both vegetarian and special enough for Christmas but here is what I have planned:

1. Carrot and walnut salad;

2. Egg and Happy Cow salad;

3. Beets and prunes salad;

4. Avocado and Chinese pear salad;

5. Mushroom julienne. 

P.S. People asked for the recipe for the wild mushroom and edible flower risotto. Here it is:

First, make the risotto, as usual. Heat up some olive oil in a pan, add a cup of arborio rice, put it in the pan, and mix around until every grain is covered with hot olive oil. Squeeze out several cloves of garlic onto the pan. Add a cup of port and wait for the alcohol to evaporate. Then start gradually adding the stock. Keep moving the rice around and only add stock in small portions. Then start adding wild mushrooms. They need a while to get cooked, so don’t wait too long. When the rice is almost ready, add half of the edible flowers. Then add some parsley. At the very end, add shredded Parmesan cheese. After the rice is cooked to al dente state, decorate it with the most beautiful of the edible flowers.

It’s crucial not to overcook the rice! Nothing is worse than risotto that has turned into a big, cement-like glop. I’m saying this from painful personal experience.

N is generally weird that way. Last week, for instance, he needed a T-shirt,  so he just went to Goodwill and bought one for $2. This is not a decision that would have occurred to me even when I was at my lowest point financially.

I asked him how he got to be this way and his answer was, “I was a graduate student for 5 years.”

He was a graduate student who worked for hedge funds every summer  (before 2007), and he’s always had more money than I. Even when he was unemployed for 2 years and I was a college professor he had more money. And now we know how that came about.