Clarissa's Blog

The resort has filled with hopeful Argentinians in their team shirts. I tell all of them that I support them, even though I’m secretly for Spain. Of course, if Argentina wins, that will be fine too.

The only non-Spanish-speaking team that I could contemplate supporting is Germany, but it’s not in the semi-finals.

How much are people earning there to make it financially feasible to pay all this money in rent? They are not even paying to own. I have no idea how much one needs to earn to be able to put anything at all aside with this type of rent payment.

One thing that I found valuable in the book “Little Soldiers” by Lenora Chu is her retelling of a conversation with a Chinese professor who explains why the American education system often fails to instill a deep understanding of such subjects as mathematics. He doesn’t put it this way, but the fear of inconveniencing the perennially sore and over-inflamed ego of the students makes learning hard. The idea that you’re supposed to be constantly entertained and fed a steady diet of positive “experiences” is antagonistic to learning.

When learning actually happens in American education is at those times when the teachers find the strength to go against the constant badgering to avoid lecturing, memorization, and rote learning. Also, there is no learning without hierarchy, and this comes into a conflict with the Western obsession with eliminating every hierarchy that has already created a lot of unpleasant effects.

I am tired of hearing our administrators chirp excitedly about “experiential learning” because it’s not learning at all. It’s entertainment. Education doesn’t need more technology, more money, or more freedom. It needs more memorization, writing down notes by hand, studying those notes repeatedly, and getting rid of the ridiculous ideas of flipped classrooms and student-centered learning.

Pink?? What kind of a moron made them pink? I’d have to use one every time because there’s no way my daughter lets me pass up a pink shopping basket.

The smart way to go is to make them white, so that they are of no particular interest to children.

Other than the unfortunate choice of color, the idea is good.

Let’s place bet on how soon the usual crowd will start parroting this fresh conspiracy:

Stupid, tiresome people.

RIP, Senator Lindsey Graham.

Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is a very entertaining book. In the second week of the COVID lockdown of March 2020, Belle’s husband of 20 years packed a bag and told her he wanted a divorce. “I don’t want the custody of the children or the house,” he said. “I just want this to end.” Belle was shocked and decided to write a memoir about the divorce.

The reason why the book is funny is that Belle is mega woke. She’s an extremely rich woman who owns tens of millions of dollars. This is inherited wealth. Belle has always led the life of extreme luxury. The vast fortune she inherited is the source of her luxury far-left political beliefs. By itself, this would not be unusual. All trust fund babies vote for Mamdani and Co. What’s funny is that this woman, who prattles endlessly about how she’s an empowered feminist, is the most infantilized, weak and helpless princess in existence. There is more agency under any random burka than in Belle Burden. There is more female power in a harem. Belle should give master classes in tradwiving to self-declared tradwives because she managed to turn herself into an appendage to a degree rarely seen since the Middle Ages. 

Belle’s husband worked for a hedge fund and saw his 50-year-old child bride very infrequently. As a result, her bumbling incompetence didn’t register much with him. It was after being forced to spend two weeks in lockdown with her that he freaked out, packed a bag, and ran away. As I read Belle’s narrative of her utter doe-eyed helplessness, I found it increasingly harder to blame the husband. Of course, he’s a jerk for leaving his children with this calamity of a woman. There is a very sad part of the narrative where Belle’s 14-year-old daughter takes on the role of mothering her utterly self-infantilized mother before being shipped off to boarding school. Both parents suck, and the children are screwed.

Belle has become some sort of a female empowerment guru as a result of writing this memoir. If that’s not the funniest thing ever, then I don’t know what is. Woke people are really bad at the things they constantly proclaim as the most important ever. Have you seen them around a black person? They get so flustered, it’s embarrassing. That’s why Robin DiAngelo’s books were so popular before Matt Walsh destroyed her brand. To us, they sounded insane, but liberals found that the books perfectly expressed their feelings of intense discomfort around African-Americans. Belle Burden is a Robin DiAngelo of leftist womanhood. And that’s what makes her memoir so funny.

Finally, we found an English-speaking kid at the swimming pool to play with Klara. Everybody else speaks Spanish, including a family of extremely rude, chain-smoking rich people dressed head to toe in Calvin Klein clothing and accessories.

Here is a quote from an excellent novel The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld. It’s set in the early 20th-century New York, where the three fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi, come for a visit. At a high-society dinner party, one of the attendees confronts Freud regarding the ultimate results of the sexual liberation that Freud’s ideas seem to seek:

“What sort of world would it be, Dr. Freud, if your views became general? I can almost picture it. The lower orders come to scorn ‘civilized morality.’ Gratification becomes god. All join in rejecting discipline and self-denial, without which life has no dignity. The mob will run riot; why should they not? And this mob, what will they want when the rules of civilization are lifted? Do you think they will want only sex? They will want new rules. They will want to obey some new madman. They will want blood—your blood, probably, Dr. Freud, if history is any guide. They will want to prove themselves superior, as the lowest always do. And they will kill to prove it. I picture bloodletting, great bloodletting, on a scale never seen before. You would pipe away civilized morality—the only thing that keeps man’s brutality in check. What do you offer in exchange, Dr. Freud? What will you put in its place?”

This novel was recommended by Chirbes, so of course it ultimately leads to the issue of Nazism, even though it is set in 1909. Leaving that aside, the query posed in this quote is important.

Psychoanalysis has long stepped away from sexual liberation as its focus. But the question remains of what happens when the corset of outwardly imposed rules is removed from people who are utterly incapable of creating and obeying rules for themselves. See my previous post for one example of what happens.

Once the self is liberated from any constraint, the result is really, really ugly.

Ben Shapiro did an hour-long show ridiculing Candace Owens’s ridiculous conspiracy theorizing. It’s extremely funny, but this humor is inaccessible to Candace Owens’ followers. These are cognitively deprived people who already have low intellectual powers that are depleted daily by the incessant pandering from a crowd of dishonest people like Candace. I feel bad for them. They don’t control their disability, and it’s not even considered a disability but a moral flaw.

Chirbes loved this 1933 American novel, and I read it on his recommendation. It din’t impress me, though. There are so many American and European novels from this time period, all of which are written in the same brittle, sarcastic tone which aims to shock the reader with its transgressiveness. I’ve read so many of them that I find them almost indistinguishable. Miss Lonelyhearts it’s an American novel, so it has a religious component, which many of its European counterparts lack. But other than that, reading about a bunch of disordered, mean alcoholic and promiscuous people who feel extremely dramatic about themselves makes very little sense.

Miss Lonelyhearts is about a young journalist who writes an agony column for a newspaper. He is traumatized by the letters people send in recounting their tragedies. His incapacity to find solace in religion makes him desperate. The idea for the novel is good, but the tone kills everything. It’s been done too many times to make an impression. I understand that it’s the zeitgeist, and the writer can fail to avoid channeling it. But this understanding does not advance my enjoyment.

If you want to read something from that era, I recommend the short stories by Dorothy Parker. They are very similar to what Nathanael West is doing in this novel, but Dorothy Parker had a sense of humor and that she makes her writing worth it.