In Sara Mesa’s novel Un amor, Nat escapes the complications of her professional life in a big city by moving to a small, remote village. Except for a few elderly people, everybody in the village is from somewhere else. “It’s a village where no children are born any longer,” people say.
Nat is living the neoliberal dream, moving around with complete freedom, changing careers at whim. She’s completely unburdened by family, relationships, friends. No ties bind her, no societal structure oppresses her, she very freely chooses what to do with her body and nobody gives a toss – it’s gotta be great, right?
But no, it’s not great at all. Young women are supposed to be the greatest beneficiaries of neoliberalism but as Un amor shows us, reality is different.
Is anybody followingthe charges in the Eric Adams corruption case? I’m overwhelmed at work and can’t look into it in detail. Is it true he’s charged over airplane ticket upgrades back in 2018-19? Or anything else?
I detest corruption but is this real corruption? Or political persecution?
I don’t like Adams, obviously. But I’m interested in what’s actually happening.
We solved the problem with the Comment section, and things have become much easier. I’m so glad. It only required a small change in the settings but WordPress keeps fussing with the interface, and it’s a chore to figure out where everything is and how to change it.
However, that’s a poor excuse for not doing it earlier. I apologize to everybody for the inconvenience and for not having changed the settings earlier. Please keep pointing out things that don’t work because I see everything very differently from the app and don’t know what the experience is for everybody else.
Sara Mesa is a hit-and-miss author. Sometimes she’s brilliant and sometimes you can see that she rushes things to get a book out to satisfy the publisher deadline. Un amor is her greatest success. It’s a short novel that offers a spot-on diagnosis of neoliberal love.
If people decide to read the novel, I’ll be happy to walk them through it once they are done right here on the blog. It’s about neoliberalism. And love. And translation. It’s very good.
A primitive person hears somebody say one thing he disagrees with and then never wants to hear from that source ever again. “If ABC is wrong about the price of cucumbers in Guam,” he says, “it follows that ABC must be wrong about everything else.”
An intellectually developed person has the exact opposite approach. He might disagree with ABC about everything but if ABC said something once that he found useful or worth considering, he will concentrate on that and feel grateful to ABC for assisting him on his intellectual journey.
Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to help Zelensky save face after the debacle of this visit to the US. He’s written a letter to Zelensky where he blames the Ukrainian ambassador to the US who organized the visit. She’s known for being a Dem-besotted twat but we all understand that it’s ultimately Zelensky’s responsibility. Johnson is an absolute class act who’s doing the diplomatic, kind, and truly Christian thing. I’m very impressed.
I also remember how he tied himself into knots to get the Ukraine aid bill passed while the Biden administration gaslit him and Ukrainians, behaving in a way that robbed me of years of my life.
He’s never going to be popular because he’s soft-spoken and old-fashioned but I’d vote for him today if he ran for president.
By the way, my Ukrainian interview about the terrible mistakes of Zelensky’s visit is my most popular yet, with over 30,000 views and overwhelmingly positive comments.
Dude, I don’t know. He never said. Dads don’t usually discuss such things, do they? She was mega pretty, had a crowd of suitors. They were barely out of their teens when they met.
They got married because that was the only normal development for falling in love back then. People in that age group didn’t cohabit or date around. I can’t even imagine anybody suggesting to a young woman like my mother anything other than marriage.
They were married for 47 years until my father’s death.
I have received a request to review an article for a journal in Tunisia. It’s almost as cool as when I was asked to review for the journal of the Czech Society of Greek Studies.
These aren’t random requests. I actually am the best person to review these articles but still, how strange, right? Czech scholars of Greek Studies and a Tunisian journal. It’s really cool.
That’s a great question. I’m loving these great questions I’m now getting.
The fall of the Berlin Wall meant nothing. It was in the same category as Princess Diana, a thing you saw on TV.
I had very politicized parents. Starting in 1987-8, they’d act like Evangelical preachers of sorts. We’d be walking down the street or strolling through the park and suddenly either my dad or my mom would stop and start ranting loudly about the need for democracy, Ukrainian independence, all sort of anti-Soviet stuff. A crowd would gather, listening , asking questions, arguing. My father looked very Jewish and I was perennially afraid that somebody would sock him in the face. But no, it always went very well. I’ll never forget two old babcias whispering behind me, “What’s that Jewish boy saying?” “He said we, Ukrainians, should be proud of our history.” “Really? Well, you know Jews are smart. He must know what he’s talking about. What does it mean, though? What history?”
But even for our very anti-Soviet, highly vocal crowd the Berlin Wall wasn’t a big deal. We never perceived Germans, even the East ones, as being anything like us. We saw them as fabulously well off compared to us. Wall or no wall, they had a charmed life. We weren’t sure what they even had to complain about. The few very lucky people who were allowed to visit East Germany shared whispered stories about the magical existence in that land of opulence.
We never thought that, oh, well, now that the Berlin Wall fell, we’ll also be free. We knew that they can let Germans go but they’ll never let us leave.
And we were right, weren’t we? They are still not letting us leave.
