I’m shocked at the high level of talks at this conference. I usually hate conferences because I get tragically distracted and can’t force myself to listen. But today I listened to talks from 9 to 6 pm, and didn’t mind at all. They were all interesting. Literally, zero woke stuff. Just scholarship. Actual useful scholarship.

Two presentations were pointedly against woke orthodoxy.

This is the second time in my life I’m attending an interesting conference. The first one was also in Germany.

A German colleague at the conference asked where I teach.

“Illinois,” I said and he lit up like a Christmas tree. I never saw European colleagues react like this to Illinois.

“That’s where your next president is from!” the German professor exclaimed. “He’s amazing!”

I thought I was losing the plot because I haven’t been out of the news cycle for so long that I’d miss a new star in the American political firmament.

“JB Pritzker!” the colleague explained, seeing my befuddled look.

In Spanish we say this is like mentioning a rope in the house of a person who hung himself.

What’s in European yoghurt (unflavored) that it’s so good? And what’s in American that it’s so not?

In other news, I solved the mystery of why it sucks to walk around the hotel. I forgot to check before booking whether it was a bad area. And of course ended up in a bad area. Why Germans made the decision to create bad areas in their cities remains shrouded in mystery.

She stole the anecdote from another woman and edited it from a cute and endearing story into “me and my fucked up kid” story. Five million views, 187,000 likes. The woman is thin as a washboard. The story is obviously fake and not even funny in this telling.

People will believe absolutely anything. Instead of growing more cautious with their information intake, they get increasingly sloppy.

I’m in Hamburg, people. What’s better compared to Spain (my main point of reference in Europe) is that there many Ukrainian flags and no Palestinian. Germans have learned something as a result of WWII. I’m speaking German everywhere and it works until people start answering with long, complicated sentences which I’m not remotely ready to understand. Also, restaurants are open and I don’t have to wait until 9:30 pm, or until I die of hypoglycemia, which is likelier.

What’s negative is that the streets are mega dirty and there are crowds of immigrant men who think they are a huge gift to womankind. I haven’t slept much since Sunday and didn’t have energy for makeup yet that is not preventing them from getting into my worn, exhausted face. One tried to grab me and the fur coat came in very useful. How old does a woman need to get to be spared these indignities? I promise I look nothing but glum and severe at this point.

The coffee sucks absolute ass. The food, though, brought me joy. Here’s the joyful food and the grim coffee:

I had North Sea plaice, and these are people who know how to cook fish. There was no salt on it at all. Nobody even appeared in the vicinity of this fish with salt. The cucumber salad had zero salt as well.

Visually, Hamburg isn’t pretty like Regensburg but the food is enormously better. In Regensburg I survived on döner kebab because the food was terrible. Even the famous Bavarian sausage was horrid. I’d never met a sausage I didn’t like, so it was a shock how bad that sausage was.

On page 166 of Curtis Yarvin’s book, I finally found where I disagree with him. Which doesn’t mean the whole book is useless. Primitive minds seek absolute agreement because nuance threatens their poor little brains.

Yarvin is a leftie. Whether he knows that or not is irrelevant. But he suffers from the leftiest of afflictions, which is that the US is to blame. For what, you’ll ask? And that question will demonstrate that you, my friend, are not a leftie.  For lefties, the US is to blame for everything. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to absolutely any event happening anywhere. To give just one example, Yarvin believes that the best description of WWII is (and I quote) “America invaded Europe.” It can only occur to an American to make WWII about America and blame America for it.

Since for lefties whatever America starts always ends poorly, it should just not start anything. Stay very little, stay in its own lane, embrace multipolar world, etc.

I, on the other hand, don’t see America (or the Anglophone culture at large because Yarvin has it in for all Anglos) as the villain of world history. The Anglo culture is vastly superior to anything else on offer. To this observation, lefties always – and I mean always, dude, it’s like they have a record player installed – jump at me with screeches of “so you want invasions? Regime change? Color revolutions?” Because in their America-hating brains, saying anything positive about America immediately leads to a nuclear holocaust.

A great book, though. I’m still reading, and more updates will follow.

I brought my pink artificial fur because the weather app said it’s cold in Germany. It occupies half of my suitcase. But it’s very warm here. Huge yellow flowers are growing outdoors.

Weather forecasts have not been my friend recently. It’s +26°C at home, and I felt like a total idjit packing the fur. I now feel like a worse idjit. I’m also wearing my winter ankle boots and thick tights, sweating like a stuck pig.

People outside are dressed for the winter in spite of the flowers in bloom.

Thank you for trying to distract me. I really appreciate it.

This is how Humanities work. Let’s use my case to see the process in action. In 2015, I took several Spanish novels, book-length essays and poetry collections that I chose completely randomly. Of course, it was me who chose them, so they have the common factor of appealing to me, which is a factor that undermines the randomness. I read them and saw certain things that helped me understand the course of the Great Recession in Spain. At that time, the IMF and the Spanish government were proclaiming that the economic crisis was over. Yippee yay! Everything is back on track! Time to celebrate! But that’s not what I saw.

It’s not going to be over, I said. The precarity, the erosion of stability, and the austerity are going to get worse. And worse. And there’s always going to be a reason why they just had to get worse. We’ll walk from this crisis to another to another to another, and they will all require austerity, I said. To me, these books were speaking to something very important. A new normal that was going to batter all of us.

Immediately, many people disagreed. No, they said, these books were just a commercial product that tried to feed off the newly fashionable topic of “crisis.” This was all a storm in a teacup, they insisted. A distraction from the really important topic which is the Spanish civil war. It’s been ten years and people are still publishing articles and books about how I was talking out of my ass about this unending precarity-inducing, austerity-requiring crisis. And other people are saying, “yeah, wow, dude, it was all true what you said.” Cut to me, having to go to the job market because my tenured job was eaten by austerity. I really wish I had been talking out of my ass on that one.

In the Humanities, we absolutely can look at the same book or case study and reach completely different conclusions. It’s considered an excellent thing. A book that doesn’t allow for completely different readings isn’t worth reading at all. That’s one of the ways I know whether something is art or not.

Last week I was talking to a scholar about a novel we are both writing about. We have very different readings of that same text. You’ll get a chance to see mine when Neoliberal Love comes out. If you find it useless, that’s absolutely fine. But maybe you have also observed that the world where we live is increasingly hostile to children, that precarization is engulfing human relationships, and that the belief we can change material reality by using certain magical words is dangerous. Then you’ll find the book useful. Or whatever I say about the subject here on the blog, you might find it useful. It might help you notice certain things, understand that they are part of a whole, figure out how they are connected.

You’ve been hanging around the blog for a while based on the question, so you must see some truth in my way of explaining these things. If not, that’s perfectly fine, too. If what I will have observed in Neoliberal Love based on my case studies of 8 randomly chosen novels is off, then the book will be unnoticed, and so it should be. I will have made a mistake, and it won’t be the first time.

Going back to Freud, the same principle is at work. Of course, anybody could have drawn different conclusions from the same case studies. But Freud’s conclusions have been very useful to many people for over a century. I know somebody who kicked a heroin addiction. That’s big. I also know people who kicked less terrible but still very powerful addictions with the help of Freudian analysts. N had a gaming addiction where he almost burned down the house and did himself permanent physical damage. He’s now completely cured from the addiction. I’ve seen incredible results. I’ve had incredible results. That other fellow with his different readings of the same studies didn’t help me in any way. Freud did.

The real way of knowing if your ideas work is if people find them helpful. That’s really the only measure. I read Zygmunt Bauman, and it’s been the most enlightening thing. There are other thinkers I read and the result can very easily be that what they say is simply useless to me. It’s all good. If Freud does nothing for you and you found a different way, that’s wonderful.

I received terrible news regarding my mother’s health, so I’ll be posting a lot of trivial stuff (like the previous post) because it helps me distract myself for a bit.

On a related note, women please don’t skip OB-GYN visits and pap smears, I beg you. They are very unpleasant but the results of not going can be worse.

She’s simply not attracted to him. There’s no basic chemistry, let alone love. She thinks she’s too pretty for him and can find somebody in a higher league. Plus, the dude has a weak personality and she would walk all over him and then despise him for it.

Politics has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. It simply sounds nobler and kinder than the real reason.

It’s great for both of them that she walked away. I have no idea what is wrong with the guy that he didn’t see that she’s not into him. As I said, a weak personality.