Clarissa's Blog

My flight to Germany was delayed by a day. The weather is perfect, so it’s not that.

Never again will I trust these “direct flights from St Louis.” Who delays by a whole day? Ludicrous

I forgot to mention that during several woke struggle sessions of the past year the Chair of Physics loudly and insistently expressed his belief that there are no structural racism, sexism and homophobia at our university and that he knows for sure that nobody at his department is racist.

I’m sure that it’s a complete coincidence that Physics was slated for elimination before anybody else.

I’m off to Germany tomorrow, on an only direct flight to Europe from our airport. Today is pretty crazy because I have to make borscht for a church event, attend the church event after Vespers, do laundry, pack, make fish and parsley root stew for N, and I promised to give comments to the Associated Press about lunacy at my university. Yes, I know, AP, but nobody else is asking, and I have to go where interest lies.

It’s not just parsley root, by the way. I do carrot, radish, bok choy and spinach and stew them all in Bangkok spices I got in Canada. It’s out of this way good.

We didn’t completely dismantle academia over one set of orthodoxies, so now let’s finish up the job over another set.

The next step is to force everybody to put up a fresh batch of “Hate has no home here” posters.

This is very, very disappointing. Swapping one kind of dogma for another is hardly worth it.

I saw on Google that he had 3 children. Unless they were all childless, there should be grandkids and great-grandkids. There should be a whole army of relatives checking in on a frail old dad. That nobody heard from or about a 95-year-old Alzheimer patient raises gynormous questions about that whole family. This is not “we collectively” being unprepared. My mom is 71, has no signs of dementia, and has truly not been the easiest parent to deal with, and that’s a huge understatement. But the likelihood that I’d have no contact for a week and wouldn’t raise half of Montreal to find out what was happening is nil. So let’s cool it with “we collectively.” This is one of those situations where individual responsibility shouldn’t be outsourced to “society.”

Also, did Hackman’s wife have zero relatives or friends? Absolutely nobody on the planet? No club, no church, no friendly neighbor? In my experience, older people have many more friends than, say, the middle aged because they have a lot of time to cultivate friendships.

My point is not that there’s a conspiracy but that the cultural elites are morally bankrupt to the point a regular person can’t begin to comprehend.

My feed is filled with “hah, hah, they voted for Trump over the price of eggs and must be so disappointed right now.”

It’s quite an extraordinary thing. They invented the idea that people voted for Trump over the price of eggs because it’s comforting to see the opponent as a bunch of dumb hicks who don’t understand anything beyond the most primitive concerns. Then they repeated this utter fabrication so many times that they believed in it. Now they are at a stage of being shocked by the Trump voters suddenly abandoning the obsession with eggs, forgetting that this obsession is their own talking point.

It’s true that liberals don’t begin to understand conservatives. And they don’t try to learn.

Freud is having a field day.

She gave him an expensive receptacle to wash gently by hand and take care in her absence. But instead, the treasured receptacle has deep gouges.

Of course, if the gouges in the actual receptacle were deep enough, she wouldn’t give a crap about what the pan looks like during the visit. That’s why the gouges on the pan awaken such unpleasant emotions.

In short, the dude needs to gouge more effectively. Maybe stop gouging in front of a screen and gouge more with the actual girlfriend. Until he takes care of her properly, she’ll nitpick about the kitchen utensils.

In case people don’t know, I’m now into Chilean literature. My first article on a Chilean author came out a couple of months ago, and there will a chapter on Chile in my new book. Chile was “the laboratory of neoliberalism”, as one scholar said, and it’s ahead of other places in the development of a neoliberal sensibility. This makes the literature created by Chilean authors today absolutely delicious to me.

A few days ago, writer Paulina Flores published a novel titled The Next Time I See You, I’ll Kill You. I immediately read it, and it’s a neoliberal delight of a book. Its narrator, Javiera, is a 32-year-old illegal immigrant from Chile to Spain. She has no stable job, no documents, no husband or child, no place to live, and no hope of getting any of these things that she painfully wants. Instead, Javiera has a litany of left-wing slogans that she tries to use to find a way not to hate her life too much.

Javiera is so lonely that she falls madly in love with another illegal immigrant, Manuel from Peru. Manuel has a little harem of desperate women he beds after convincing them to embrace “polyamorous identity.” Javiera hates being one of several interchangeable receptacles for Manuel’s ejaculate but she tries to convince herself that polyamory is what will finally make her really free and really rebellious. In the meantime, she fantasizes about murdering Manuel’s other mistresses in hopes that, if they manage to stay alone for a bit, he will finally appreciate her and commit.

Even 10-15 years ago, Latin American women really knew how to not be such utter losers in amorous relationships. If they agreed to be mistresses, they at least expected to be put up in a place of their own and have their bills paid. Javiera and the rest of Manuel’s girlfriends have lost that skill. They sulk around, fully realizing that they hate this arrangement but are unable to find a way to explain to themselves why this newfound form of freedom is making them so miserable.

Javiera and her sex slave sisters are terrified of growing older. They fantasize about being little girls or teenagers because the realization that they are in their thirties and have achieved absolutely nothing is unbearable. Besides, there’s always a battalion of younger, fresher bodies for Manuel to use up and throw out after Javiera’s shift in the policule is terminated by her age.

The complete abjection of these poor stupid women is painful to observe. Two centuries of battling for women’s liberation to achieve this? The most oppressive patriarchal marriage is better than what Javiera has. In college we had to read a foundational short story of Latín American feminism where a woman feels horribly oppressed because the husband who gives her wealth, comfort, status and respect is not extremely sensitive. Even a quarter century ago I hated that story with such a passion that the professor complained about me being disruptive to the department Chair. He responded that I was the best student in the history of that department and if she couldn’t teach me, maybe she shouldn’t be teaching at all. But I digress.

In the intervening years, women have liberated themselves from the insensitive husband, wealth, status, and respect. Now Javiera and Co have an insensitive Manuel who barely notices when one of them dies and immediately proceeds to find another desperate mark. What a fantastic feminist achievement that is.

Romania is having a normal one:

Yes, you ready showed everybody, Romania. Nobody can outdo you in “wait, what?” news.

The reason why the university wants to get rid of full professors isn’t that they cost too much. It’s never really about money. People who have been with the university for many years are the keepers of institutional memory. Their knowledge stands in the way of change for the sake of change.

When the new Chancellor came in, he started saying, “Let’s introduce this new policy. It’s so obvious this is going to be a great change. I have no idea why this hasn’t been done yet.”

Older professors said, “It was done. These changes were introduced in 2010. They were catastrophic, and the current system was created to mend the damage.”

There were several things of this kind. Every time, older professors would say, “this was tried, it failed. If you start taking things apart, these will be the consequences, just like the last time this was tried.”

Get rid of the people with memory, and you can wreak any havoc you want, put it on your CV and move on, which is the whole play for this new Chancellor. He started interviewing for a new job a year after we hired him. Nobody else is stupid enough to take him but what his plan is has been clear from the start.