Clarissa's Blog

There is a male character in Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies. He is Javier, the husband of the school psychologist who enjoys transing children. We see him doing the dishes, feeding the baby, changing the baby, comforting the baby, cleaning. He’s always sweet, smiling, always completely supportive in a quiet, self-effacing manner.

Does this remind you of anything?

Yes, Javier is the “angel in the house”, a subservient, patriarchal woman.

For all of Piñeiro’s dedication to destroying the gender binary, she ends up recreating it. Her women are men and her men are women. They aren’t interesting, nuanced personalities but collections of the hoariest gender stereotypes.

So what was the point of all this if the result is the re-creation of the same gender binary but with the biological sexes switched?

In the novel, everybody envies Javier’s wife for snagging such an excellent husband but in reality this type of man isn’t deeply popular.

We found persimmons growing in the wild, and this seems very bizarre. Should there even be persimmons in Illinois?

They are smallish but extremely sweet.

Speaking of movies, Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? is opening in theaters next weekend. It’s a very big deal that it’s going on the big screen first. There needs to be a thriving movie-going culture and there need to be watchable movies. Plus, it’s crucial that normies find out what the “anti-racist” racists actually believe. They don’t know and when they find out, it will be too late as usual.

Walsh’s movie will be one of two conservative movies in theaters currently, which is unusual. Reagan with Dennis Quaid is doing unexpectedly well at the box office. Critics hate it with a passion but viewers are flocking to the low-budget movie.

I will be at the very first showing of Am I Racist? in my town, a matinee. It has to be an early showing because what would we do with Klara if we wanted to go in an evening?

I’ll post my impressions after I watch, and I hope many people go and we can discuss it after.

Gen Z want less sex in movies, according to a new study.

A new study of 10 – 24 year olds found that 47% said sex “isn’t needed” for most TV shows & movies while 44% believe romance is “overused”

(Source: https://t.co/P5OzBNG0wg) pic.twitter.com/XGo5DisqRg

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 26, 2024

I’m clearly not Gen-Z but I never understood why sex scenes need to be in movies either. If one wants pornography, it’s easy to find and consume in ways that brings physiological relief. If you aren’t seeking this kind of relief, then I don’t understand why it’s interesting to stare at naked people.

The amount of pornography currently available is such that it’s puzzling what value anybody thinks yet another sex scene can bring to a movie.

Twenty minutes after writing the previous post, I stumbled on the suggestion, in chapter 8 of Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies, that women get heavier prison sentences than men for the same crimes. This is so divorced from reality that it’s kind of scary.

It’s clear why this brand of feminism eagerly embraced the idea that men make better women than women. For Solnits and Piñeiros, women are profoundly inferior. Women are always victims. There’s nothing a woman can do to not be a victim. Women have absolutely no agency. It stands to reason that one would harbor secret contempt for such weak, pathetic creatures and want men, whom Solnit and Co imagine as all-powerful and godlike, to substitute them.

Here’s what I said 3 years ago about the novel Tuya (All Yours) by the Argentinean writer Claudia Piñeiro:

Tuya is a parody of the “resufrida mujer latina” or “the long-suffering Latin American woman” trope but I can just imagine some dour, humorless academic taking it completely seriously and providing a “feminist reading” of the novel. God, I hope the colleague who bought Piñeiro’s books isn’t planning to do that or isn’t reading this post.

Book Notes: Claudia Piñeiro’s Tuya

All Yours is an excellent novel. It’s about the wife of a perennially cheating husband but she’s such an insufferable, self-aggrandizing victim that it’s impossible to feel bad for her. A very funny novel, hugely entertaining but guess what? No dour harpy needed to explain the novel from a tediously politicized point of view. Piñeiro did that herself.

In the recently released sequel to All Yours, titled The Time of the Flies, Piñeiro explains how we are supposed to perceive All Yours, providing an actual bibliography consisting of books by Rebecca Solnit (the creator of mansplaining) and similar characters. There’s even a screed on “transwomen are also women or even better women than the primitive basic women because their womaning is so much more womanly.” And slogans about the importance of “inclusive language.” And other similarly aggravating stuff.

Of course, it was obvious this entire time that Piñeiro is very left-wing. She’s Argentinean, so what else can she be? But she’s talented. How could it possibly occur to her to quote the cognitively unwell Solnit or provide explanations of her own writing? Both things are beyond tacky.

I plan to still try to finish the novel but I’m majorly discouraged. Maybe I can simply skip the woke indoctrination chapters, even though skipping anything is almost physically painful to a literary critic.

All Yours is still very recommended, though. It’s very funny even though it’s become clear that the author didn’t mean it to be.

Brought to us courtesy of the Biden/Harris administration and its 4-year efforts to coddle Iran and protect Russia:

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1832318919765320183?t=O2hE0uKu6JFi-iVEdetddA&s=19

The endless expressions of alarm, concern and preoccupation from the Biden/Harris administration have become an international joke. The administration issues these statements about being alarmed almost daily regarding a wide variety of issues. You wouldn’t know it if you don’t specifically follow foreign policy but there are actual stand-up comedy routines about how the Biden/Harris WH engineers bizarre situations and then expresses alarm over them.

We deserve better even if it’s not on offer.

Only a small minority of adults (20% or less) know the meaning of words such as audacious, ominous, tirade, encumber, plagiarize, impale, travesty.

Worth bearing in mind. Many people cannot reason very well due to low intelligence. pic.twitter.com/BsKbgUgKuQ

— Whyvert (@whyvert) September 3, 2024

My 8-year-old doesn’t know “encumber, impale and tirade” but she knows the rest. Plus, “surreptitiously” and “preposterous.” She wouldn’t mix up “incidentally” and “accidentally.” Or “sarcastically” and “ironically.”

Because I actually speak like that.

I’m so weird.

I never read anything by Italian novelists, which is why I decided to try Private Life (La vita intima in the original) by Niccolò Ammaniti. It’s a good novel which would make an even better movie.

The main character is Maria Cristina, the wife of the Prime Minister of Italy and “the most beautiful woman in the world” according to social media. She is an inoffensive but extremely vapid creature who wants nothing in life but to wear cute outfits and exist in a state of bovine contentment. But people keep expecting that she do more. Her small daughter needs attention and care, her husband needs her to be a wife and not a flower pot, her only friend wants Maria Cristina to notice that he’s a human being and not a household appliance, and the press expects her to answer at least a couple of questions every few years. All these demands confuse the one-dimensional, stupid Maria Cristina.

Incapable of feeling anything beyond physical pain from stubbing her toe and desperate to spur on her atrophied sensibilities, Maria Cristina engages in a sadomasochistic game with an old acquaintance she thinks is blackmailing her. Or courting her. Or both. The weird tricks these very rich, bored people play on each other in-between virtue-signaling by way of their globalist opinions are tawdry and pathetic. The political and financial elites of Italy are depicted in Private Life as not so much wicked as vacuous and primitive. It’s impossible to despise or even dislike Maria Cristina like one can’t despise a cat or a guppy fish. If she were a tad more evolved, I’d call her immoral but to break moral laws, you need to understand them, and Maria Cristina is clearly not equipped for that.

It’s a good novel, and I’m glad that Italian literature is alive and well. If Niccolò Ammaniti is any indication, Italians really despise their elites but, hey, can anybody blame them?