Clarissa's Blog

I just made my first play on words in German. Instead of frühstück, I said frohstück. Because breakfast here at the hotel is so good, it makes me glad. They serve herring in a fur coat. The real kind! For breakfast! Plus, separate slices of herring. And there’s fennel tea.

Duolingo really works. I’m having conversations everywhere. I ask questions and understand answers. I’m sure I make a goobizillion mistakes in the process but dialogue is happening, and that’s what matters.

The first talk of the second day of the conference was openly conservative. A Spanish academic said that the Left has created a hive mentality that is not in the least more open or less ideological than that of the Franco dictatorship. And it’s time to let go of the Civil War era resentments instead of stoking them with “historical memory initiatives.” Let’s get over our addiction to feeling virtuous by condemning the past and let’s concentrate on the actual problems our society faces, he said.

This might sound like the most boring of commonsensical approaches but I never thought I’d hear something like this at an academic conference. Of course, several Latin American women started henpecking the speaker for thought crimes but the next speaker said similar things and I nodded so much my head almost flew off into outer space.

After the session, I asked the Ukrainian organizer to tell me honestly if I’d died abs was now in an intellectual heaven. “What did you expect?” he said. “That I’d gather a group of leftist twaddlers?”

First of all, I suggest removing the word procrastinate from your vocabulary because it’s neoliberal. You are not a robot that must be at peak productivity at all times. You are a complicated, profound human being with a soul, not a machine. We aren’t looking to fix you but to understand you.

Here’s what I suggest. Make a list of tasks that you are avoiding. What do they have in common? Is it a particular kind of thing that triggers your rejection? I have found, for example, that the emails I don’t answer the longest are those I really do want to answer. Things I delay are the ones I’d enjoy the most. This is a wrinkle in my personal psyche that might be completely alien to you. I have no idea what puts you in the rejection mode but you do. What are you gaining by avoiding these tasks? What image of yourself does this practice keep in place? Who is this person who “procrastinates”? What would you have to give up if you stopped being that person?

Yesterday at the conference I didn’t participate in the discussion or make any comments during the entire first session. I felt small an unimportant, a person that nobody wanted to hear from. I had to spend 10 minutes in the bathroom putting on my competent persona. It was an actual effort to remember that I’m brilliant, I’m great, and I was invited because people wanted to hear from me. I was successful and talked up a storm at the rest of the sessions. But if I hadn’t been successful, it would have been fine, too. It’s OK to fail. We need to get out of the cycle of the neoliberal guilt and self-blame.

I have a friend who’s also in academia. He was torturing himself because he didn’t publish much. I told him, “Dude, you are the most effective advocate for your program. You are seriously good at this shit. So you are not into research, big whoop. Look at how much you have done to defend the program from administration’s depredations. Thanks to you, several people have contracts. You love doing this, and you are achieving incredible results. Why are you so down on yourself?”

The guy thought he was a loser when he was one of the winningest winners I know. It’s ok to tell yourself, “I don’t like this shit and I’m not good at it but I’m good at this other shit, so I’ll do it.” I have had to accept that I’m deeply unsociable and have no circle of acquaintance after 16 years in academia. Everybody asks, “do you know this scholar? Have you met that one?” And no, I don’t know anybody and met no one. But I’m massively well-read because the time I didn’t spend socializing I spent reading. Years of feeling like garbage until I finally realized it’s OK to be how I am. And it’s OK not to.

I talked to two lefties with green hair and many piercings yesterday. One is German and another Spanish. They have overcome the 2008 resentments and united in their dislike of Ukraine.

“We love you, Clarissa,” they chimed in unison, “but this is horrible for our countries.”

I’m a sucker for patriotic arguments, so I was willing to listen.

“What specifically do you mean?” I asked.

“Don’t you see? We will now have to invest a lot of money into defense.”

“That’s good, though, right?” I said. “Defense is good.”

“But we’ll have to take that money out of the social programs.”

“Which social programs?” I asked. “Weren’t we just talking about how austerity cuts have been in place for 15 years?”

“We have really important social programs, and we don’t want to see them cut because now we have to buy weapons.”

“Which programs?” I persisted.

“Well, we need a lot of programs for refugees. We have a lot of refugees.”

This is the most bizarre mentality. The US needs to pay for their defense and Ukrainians have to welcome conquest so that Western Europeans can move in more migrants. I was outside a total of three minutes yesterday and still managed to get harassed, so my interest in the idea of more refugees was nil. I expressed that sentiment, and one of my interlocutors was visibly annoyed.

“Please be honest,” he said, “would you be as upset if these men were blond and light-skinned?”

The left has lost even the capacity to argue its case. Its response to absolutely any argument is calling people racists. The leftists I talked about are academics, highly educated people. They have impoverished themselves intellectually on purpose because otherwise their belief system can’t be maintained. Back when I was a leftist, we had ideas and not just name-calling. Leftism has degenerated badly in the past decade and a half.

This is at Columbia:

We are dismantling crucial American research because of a foreign conflict. This isn’t how a nation-state works. And yes, I would say exactly the same if these were pro-Russian protesters.

https://twitter.com/JamesEsses/status/1899550848922841307?t=4OIxDAMq-v5eYEtnFmaE0g&s=19

This is not true, is it? Tell me he’s inventing this for attention.

I mean, I really wouldn’t mind people not stuffing their faces with croissants when I’m around but imagine getting institutional guidance to make them stop.

OK, I just imagined it and it felt horrible.

At the dinner, the organizer of the conference, a female German scholar stunned me.

I expressed doubts regarding the usefulness of Trump’s tariffs and she practically exploded. Get this: in defense of the tariffs.

“You just said in your talk that you want a nation-state, right?” she ranted. “You don’t like neoliberalism. But how can you have a nation-state when there are no borders in any meaningful sense of the word? A national government needs to delineate the limits of the state. Isn’t that clear?”

This was before drinks were served, and it was pretty much the last thing I expected to hear in this milieu.

Of course, I shouldn’t be that surprised because the scholar who inserted me into this conference is a very religious Ukrainian colleague. But still. This is turning out to be a very unusual experience.

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.