Opinions, art, debate
Please join us in 46 minutes. Yes, you won’t understand what I’m saying but who cares? You already heard it all a million times.
I pray to God there’s no lawn mowing or construction outside. And I don’t sweat too much because I can’t turn on my table fan, and it gets too hot inside.
Also, it turns out that the journalist and I attended the same university in Kharkiv at the exact same time. I was in foreign languages (English and German) and he was in history. And now we meet.
Is there even a politician who dresses worse than Rishi Sunak? Everything he wears is 3 sizes too small. He looks preposterous. The dude has everything to look distinguished and serious but he chooses not to. I don’t get it.
Giorgia Meloni, on the other hand, appeared in a powder pink number today that left me breathless. Are these politicians enacting stereotypes about their countries through the clothes they wear?
Yes, let’s police emojis in people’s private correspondence. That’s a brilliant plan.
In their zeal to dunk on “the other side”, people forget that they only have one immortal soul, and plastering it with excrement for such a dubious gain is not a great idea.
If you are Orthodox, you’ll get it:
This is Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
I remember giving a talk at the local public library, and I showed some images. One person in the audience suddenly exclaimed, “So wait, are you saying there are Christians in Ukraine???”
I explained that Kyiv converted to Christianity in 988. I even had to write it on the board in a gigantic script, so people would process the figure. Then I talked about the persecution of Christianity in the USSR, and everybody was even more stunned.
Writing is hard. It takes too long and it’s really painful. This is why I don’t write articles, book chapters and books. The very idea of writing an article is too daunting. The moment I think, “I need to work on my article today”, I become paralyzed to the point I can barely move. So I quit all that and instead of writing articles, I say “today I’ll write two sentences on how the metaphors of stone and water are central to this novel” and “today I’ll integrate the quote from Byung-Chul Han into paragraph 6 on page 3.”
Everything I have written was done this way. And I have written a lot.
Another thing that helps if I’m completely blocked is to start writing my two sentences not in a Word file but in the posting box of this blog. That removes the stress and moves things straight along. A different place to write is always a good idea. I always find it useful to write in a less formal place and do it between other pressing activities. I do great writing during meetings. Every summer we have a 6-hour meeting, and I write massively there because it feels good to know I’m doing something useful while everybody else is drowning in yet another endless discussion of a yet another stupid bureaucratic policy.
Try unexpected places, formats, times. Try dressing up to the nines for when you write. Have something completely unusual for breakfast, sleep on the different side of the bed. Everything that’s unusual can kick you out of getting to deep inside your head and getting stressed out over the daunting need to write.
Which program, though? There is no program. We will all sprout wings and take off in flight before there is any such program or anything remotely resembling it.
See how nobody is calling you a sausage? That’s probably because you are not a sausage.
People don’t even realize what they are doing when they make these statements. It’s become so natural to them. It’s not about what things are. It’s about what you call them.
Here’s the famous bean stew, by the way:
Delicious and already gone.
The journalist who invited me is a controversial figure. One of my prospective publishers in Ukraine even asked me to remove a quote from him from my book.* Obviously, I didn’t publish with them because I’m not escaping from one form of censorship to plunge right into another one.
Matt Walsh has 2,8 million YouTube subscribers, and with the US population plus the global reach of an English-speaking journalist, you can imagine the equivalent of 500,000 subscribers for a dude in Ukraine.
* Most of Ukrainian publishers, news outlets and cultural projects exist on Soros money. The one I finally chose for my book is not a huge publisher but it’s independent and despises Soros money. As a result, nobody had a single objection to the content of the book.
Clarissa's Blog 